Ten-hundred deep the drifted daisies break Here at the hill"s foot; on its top, the wheat Hangs meagre-bearded; and, in vague retreat, The wisp-like blooms of the moth-mulleins shake.
And where the wild-pink drops a crimson flake, And morning-glories, like young lips, make sweet The shaded hush, low in the honeyed heat, The wild-bees hum; as if afraid to wake One sleeping there; with no white stone to tell The story of existence; but the stem Of one wild-rose, towering o"er brier and weed, Where all the day the wild-birds requiem; Within whose shade the timid violets spell An epitaph, only the stars can read.
SIMULACRA
Dark in the west the sunset"s somber wrack Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split, Along whose battlements the battle lit Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back, A mighty city, red with ruin and sack, Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit, Showed where the G.o.d of Slaughter seemed to sit With conflagration glaring at each crack.
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes Our dreams as real as our waking seems With recollections time can not destroy, So in the mind of Nature now awakes Haply some wilder memory, and she dreams The stormy story of the fall of Troy.
BEFORE THE END
How does the Autumn in her mind conclude The tragic masque her frosty pencil writes, Broad on the pages of the days and nights, In burning lines of orchard, wold, and wood?
What lonelier forms--that at the year"s door stood At spectral wait--with wildly wasted lights Shall enter? and with melancholy rites Inaugurate their sadder sisterhood?-- Sorrow, who lifts a signal hand, and slow The green leaf fevers, falling ere it dies; Regret, whose pale lips summon, and gaunt Woe Wakes the wild-wind harps with sonorous sighs; And Sleep, who sits with poppied eyes and sees The earth and sky grow dream-accessories.
WINTER
The flute, whence Autumn"s misty finger-tips Drew music--ripening the pinched kernels in The burly chestnut and the chinquapin, Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,-- Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips And surly songs whistle around his chin: Now the wild days and wilder nights begin When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips.
Thy songs, O Autumn, are not lost so soon!
Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute, Which, unto Winter"s masculine airs, doth give Thy own creative qualities of tune, By which we see each bough bend white with fruit, Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative.
h.o.a.r-FROST
The frail eidolons of all blossoms Spring, Year after year, about the forest tossed, The magic touch of the enchanter, Frost, Back from the Heaven of the Flow"rs doth bring; Each branch and bush in silence visiting With phantom beauty of its blooms long lost: Each dead weed bends, white-haunted of its ghost, Each dead flower stands ghostly with blossoming.
This is the wonder-legend Nature tells To the gray moon and mist a winter"s night; The fairy-tale, which her weird fancy "spells With all the glamour of her soul"s delight: Before the summoning sorcery of her eyes Making her spirit"s dream materialize.
THE WINTER MOON
Deep in the dell I watched her as she rose, A face of icy fire, o"er the hills; With snow-sad eyes to freeze the forest rills, And snow-sad feet to bleach the meadow snows: Pale as some young witch who, a-listening, goes To her first meeting with the Fiend; whose fears Fix demon eyes behind each bush she nears; Stops, yet must on, fearful of following foes.
And so I chased her, startled in the wood, Like a discovered Oread, who flies The Faun who found her sleeping, each nude limb Glittering betrayal through the solitude; Till in a frosty cloud I saw her swim, Like a drowned face, a blur beneath the ice.
IN SUMMER
When in dry hollows, hilled with hay, The vesper-sparrow sings afar; And, golden gray, dusk dies away Beneath the amber evening-star: There, where a warm and shadowy arm The woodland lays around the farm, To meet you where we kissed, dear heart, To kiss you at the tryst, dear heart, To kiss you at the tryst!
When clover fields smell cool with dew, And crickets cry, and roads are still; And faint and few the fire-flies strew The dark where calls the whippoorwill; There, in the lane, where sweet again The petals of the wild-rose rain, To stroll with head to head, dear heart, And say the words oft said, dear heart, And say the words oft said!
RAIN AND WIND
I hear the hoofs of horses Galloping over the hill, Galloping on and galloping on, When all the night is shrill With wind and rain that beats the pane-- And my soul with awe is still.
For every dripping window Their headlong rush makes bound, Galloping up, and galloping by, Then back again and around, Till the gusty roofs ring with their hoofs, And the draughty cellars sound.
And then I hear black hors.e.m.e.n Hallooing in the night; Hallooing and hallooing, They ride o"er vale and height, And the branches snap and the shutters clap With the fury of their flight.
Then at each door a horseman,-- With burly bearded lip Hallooing through the keyhole,-- Pauses with cloak a-drip; And the door-k.n.o.b shakes and the panel quakes "Neath the anger of his whip.
All night I hear their gallop, And their wild halloo"s alarm; The tree-tops sound and vanes go round In forest and on farm; But never a hair of a thing is there-- Only the wind and storm.
UNDER ARCTURUS
I.
"I belt the morn with ribboned mist; With baldricked blue I gird the noon, And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed, White-buckled with the hunter"s moon.
"These follow me," the season says: "Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways, With gipsy gold that weighs their backs."
II.
A daybreak horn the Autumn blows, As with a sun-tanned band he parts Wet boughs whereon the berry glows; And at his feet the red-fox starts.
The leafy leash that holds his hounds Is loosed; and all the noonday hush Is startled; and the hillside sounds Behind the fox"s bounding brush.
When red dusk makes the western sky A fire-lit window through the firs, He stoops to see the red-fox die Among the chestnut"s broken burs.
Then fanfaree and fanfaree, Down vistas of the afterglow His bugle rings from tree to tree, While all the world grows hushed below.
III.