Part 3

Like Atalanta’s spheres of gold, Within the orchard, apples rolled From sudden hands of boughs that lay Their leaves, like palms, against the day; And near them pears of rusty brown Rolled bruised; and peaches, pink with down, And furry as the ears of Pan; Or, like Diana’s cheeks, a tan Beneath which burnt a tender fire; Or wan as Psyche’s with desire. And down the orchard vistas,--young, A hickory basket by him swung, A hat of straw against the sun Drawn shadowy o’er his face,--he strode; As if he looked to find some one, His eyes searched every bend of road. Before him, like a living burr, Rattled the noisy grasshopper. And where the cows’ melodious bells Trailed music up and down the dells, Beside the spring, that o’er the ground Went whimpering like a fretful hound, He saw her waiting, fair and slim, Her pail forgotten there, for him. Yellow as sunset skies and pale As fairy clouds that stay or sail Through azure vaults of summer, blue As summer heavens, the wildflowers grew; And blossoms on which spurts of light Fell laughing--like the lips one might Feign once were Hebe’s, or a girl’s That laughter lights with rows of pearls. Long ferns, in murmuring masses heaped; And mosses moist, in beryl steeped And musk aromas of the wood And silence of the solitude: And everything that near her blew The spring had showered thick with dew.-- Across the rambling fence she leaned, Her fresh, round arms all white and bare; Her artless beauty, bonnet-screened, Simplicity from feet to hair. A wood-thrush gurgled in a vine-- Ah! ’tis his step, ’tis he she hears; The wild-rose smelt like some rare wine-- He comes, ah, yes! ’tis he who nears. And her brown eyes and happy face Said welcome. And with rustic grace He leant beside her; and they had Some talk with youthful laughter glad: I know not what: I know but this-- Its final period was a kiss.

SUMMER

I

Hang out your loveliest star, O Night! O Night! Your richest rose, O Dawn! To greet sweet Summer, her, who, clothed in light, Leads Earth’s best hours on. Hark! how the wild birds of the woods Throat it within the dewy solitudes! The brook sings low and soft, The trees make song, As, from her heaven aloft, Comes blue-eyed Summer like a girl along.

II

And as the Day, her lover, leads her in, How bright his beauty glows! How red his lips, that ever try to win Her mouth’s delicious rose! And from the beating of his heart Warm winds arise and sighing thence depart: And from his eyes and hair The light and dew Fall round her everywhere, And heaven above her is an arch of blue.

III

Come to the forest, or the treeless meadows Deep with their hay or grain; Come where the hills lift high their thrones of shadows, And tawny orchards reign. Come where the reapers whet the scythe; Where golden sheaves are heaped; where berriers blithe, With willow-basket and with pail, Swarm knoll and plain; Where flowers freckle every vale, And Beauty goes with hands of berry-stain.

IV

Come where the dragonflies, a brassy blue, Flit round the wildwood streams, And, sucking at some horn of honey-dew, The wild-bee hums and dreams. Come where the butterfly waves wings of sleep, Gold-disked and mottled, over blossoms deep: Come where beneath the rustic bridge The creek-frog cries; Or in the shade the rainbowed midge, Above the emerald pools, with murmurings flies.

V

Come where the cattle browse within the brake, As red as oak and strong; Where cattle-bells the echoes faintly wake, And milkmaids sing their song. Come where the vine-trailed rocks, with waters hoary, Tell to the sun some legend old or story; Or where the sunset to the land Speaks words of gold; Where Ripeness walks, a wheaten band About her brow, making the buds unfold.

VI

Come where the woods lift up their stalwart arms Unto the star-sown skies; Knotted and gnarled, that to the winds and storms Fling mighty rhapsodies: Or to the moon repeat what they have seen, When Night upon their shoulders vast doth lean. Come where the dew’s clear syllable Slips from the rose; And where the fireflies fill The dark with golden music of their glows.

VII

Now while the dingles and the vine-roofed glens Whisper their flowery tale Unto the silence; and the lakes and fens Unto the moonlight pale Murmur their rapture, let us seek her out, Her of the honey throat and peach-sweet pout, Summer! and at her feet, The love of old Lay like a sheaf of wheat, And of our hearts the purest gold of gold.

INDIAN SUMMER

The dawn is a warp of fever, The eve is a woof of fire; And the month is a singing weaver Weaving a red desire.

With stars Dawn dices with Even For the rosy gold they heap On the blue of the day’s broad heaven, On the black of the night’s wide deep.

It’s--“Reins to the blood!” and “Marry!” The Season’s a prince who burns With the teasing lusts that harry His heart for a wench who spurns.

It’s--“Crown us a beaker with sherry, To drink to the doxy’s heels; A tankard of wine o’ the berry, To lips like a cloven peel’s.

“’S death! if a king be saddened, Right so let a fool laugh lies: But wine! when a king is gladdened, And a woman’s waist and her eyes.”

He hath shattered the loom of the weaver, And left but a leaf that flits, He hath seized heaven’s gold, and a fever Of mist and of frost is its.

He hath tippled the buxom beauty, And gotten her hug and her kiss-- The wide world’s royal booty To pile at her feet for this.

TO SORROW

I

O dark-eyed spirit of the marble brow, Whose look is silence and whose touch is night, Who walkest lonely through the world, O thou, Who sittest lonely with Life’s blown-out light; Who in the hollow hours of night’s noon Criest like some lost child; Whose anguish-fevered eyeballs seek the moon To cool their pulses wild. Thou who dost bend to kiss Joy’s sister cheek, Turning its rose to alabaster; yea, Thou who art terrible and mad and meek, Why in my heart art thou enshrined to-day? Sorrow, O say! O say!

II

Now Spring is here and all the world is white, I will go forth, and where the forest robes Itself in green, and every hill and height Crowns its fair head with blossoms,--spirit globes Of hyacinth and crocus dashed with dew,-- I will forget my grief, And thee, O Sorrow, gazing at the blue, Beneath a last year’s leaf, Of some brief violet the south-wind woos, Or bluet, whence the west-wind raked the snow; The baby eyes of love, the darling hues Of happiness, that thou canst never know, Mother of pain and woe.

III

On some hoar upland, hoar with clustered thorns, Hard by a river’s windy white of waves, I shall sit down with Spring,--whose eyes are morns Of light; whose cheeks the rose of health enslaves,-- And so forget thee, braiding in Spring’s hair The snowdrop, tipped with green, The cool-eyed primrose and the trillium fair, And moony celandine. Contented so to lie within her arms, Forgetting all the sere and sad and wan, Remembering Love alone, who, o’er earth’s storms, High on the mountains of perpetual dawn, Leads the glad Hours on.

IV

Or in the peace that follows storm, when Even, Within the west, stands dreaming, lone and far, Clad on with green and silver, and the Heaven Is brightly brooched with one gold-glittering star, I will lie down beside a mountain lake, Round which the tall pines sigh, And, breathing musk of rain from boughs that shake Storm balsam, blowing by, Make friends of Dream and Contemplation high, And Music, listening to the mocking-bird,-- Who through the hush sends its melodious cry,-- And so forget a while that other word, That all loved things must die.

NIGHT

Out of the East, as from an unknown shore, Thou comest with thy children in thine arms,-- Slumber and Dream,--whom mortals so adore,-- Their flowing raiment sculptured to their charms: Soft on thy breast thy lovely children rest, Laid like two roses in one balmy nest. Silent thou comest, swiftly too and slow. There is no other presence like to thine, When thou approachest with thy babes divine, Thy shadowy face above them bending low, Blowing the ringlets from their brows of snow.

Oft have I taken Sleep from thy dark arms, And fondled her fair head, with poppies wreathed, Within my bosom’s depths, until its storms With her were hushed and I but faintly breathed: And then her sister, Dream, with frolic art Arose from rest, and in my sleeping heart Blew bubbles of dreams where elfin worlds were lost; Worlds where my stranger soul looked down at me, Or walked with spirits by a rainbowed sea, Or smiled, an unfamiliar shape of frost, Floating on gales of breathless melody.

Day comes to us in garish glory garbed; But thou, thou bringest to the tired heart Rest and sweet silence, wherein are absorbed All the vain tumults of the mind and mart. Whether thou comest with hands full of stars, Or clothed in storm and cloud, the lightning bars, Rolling the thunder like a mighty dress, God moves with thee; we seem to hear His feet, Wind-like, along the floors of Heaven beat; To see His face, revealed in awfulness, Through thee, O Night, to ban us or to bless.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

I

The shadows sit and stand about its door Like uninvited guests and poor; And all the long, hot summer day The ceaseless locust dins its roundelay In one old sycamore. The squirrel leaves upon its rotting roof Its wandering tracks In empty hulls; and in its clapboard cracks The spider weaves a windy woof, And cells of clay the mud-wasp packs. The she-fox whelps upon its floor; And o’er its sun warped door The owlet roosts; and where the mosses run, The freckled snake basks in the sun.

II

The children of what fathers sleep Beneath those melancholy pines? The slow slugs slime their headstones there where creep The doddered poison-vines. The orchard, near the meadow deep, Lifts up decrepit arms, Black-lichened in a withering heap. No sap swells up to make it leap And shout against spring’s storms; No blossom lulls its age asleep; The winds bring sad alarms. Big, bell-round pears and pippins, russet-red, No maiden gathers now; The worm-bored trunks weep tears of gum instead, Oozing from each old bough.

III

The woodlands around it are solitary And fold it like gaunt hands; The sunlight is sad and the moonlight is dreary, The hum of the country is lonesome and weary, And the bees go by in bands To gladder and lovelier lands. The grasses are rotting in walk and in bower; The loneliness,--dank and rank As a chamber where lies for a lonely hour An old-man’s corpse with many a flower,-- Is hushed and blank. And even the birds have passed it by, Gone with their songs to a happier sky, A happier sky and bank.

IV

In its desolate halls are lying, Gold, blood-red, and browned, Drifted leaves of autumn dying; And the winds, above them sighing, Turn them round and round, Make a ghostly sound As of footsteps falling, flying, Ghostly footsteps, faintly flying Through the haunted house.

V

Gazing down in her white shroud, Wov’n of windy cloud, Comes at night the phantom moon; Comes, and all the shadows soon, Crowding chambers of the house, Haunting whispering rooms, arouse;-- Shadows, ghosts, her rays lead on, Till beneath the cloud Like a ghost she’s gone, In her gusty shroud, O’er the haunted house.

AUTUMN

I oft have met her slowly wandering Beside a leafy stream, her locks blown wild, Her cheeks a hectic flush, more fair than Spring, As if on her the scarlet copse had smiled: Or I have seen her sitting, dark and tall,-- Her gentle eyes with foolish weeping dim,-- Beneath a twisted oak from whose red leaves She wound great drowsy wreaths and let them fall; The west-wind in her hair, that made it swim Far out behind, brown as the rustling sheaves.

Or in the hill-lands I have often seen The marvel of her passage; glimpses faint Of glimmering woods that glanced the hills between, Like Indian faces, fierce with forest paint. Or I have met her ’twixt two beechen hills, Within a dingled valley near a fall, Held in her nut-brown hand one cardinal flower; Or wading dimly where the leaf-dammed rills Went babbling through the wildwood’s arrased hall, Where burned the beech and maples glared their power.

Or I have met her by a ruined mill, Where trailed the crimson creeper, serpentine, On fallen leaves that stirred and rustled, chill, And watched her swinging in the wildgrapevine. While Beauty, sad among the vales and mountains, More sad than death, or all that death can teach, Dreamed of decay and stretched appealing arms, Where splashed the murmur of the forest’s fountains: With all her loveliness did she beseech, And all the sorrow of her wildwood charms.

Once only in a hollow, girt with trees, A-dream amid wild asters filled with rain, I glimpsed her cheeks, red-berried by the breeze, In her dark eyes the night’s sidereal stain. And once upon an orchard’s tangled path, Where all the goldenrod had turned to brown, Where russets rolled and leaves lay sweet of breath, I did behold her ’mid her aftermath Of blossoms standing, in her gypsy gown, Within her gaze the dreams of life and death.

ALONG THE OHIO

Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold; A river of flame the wide Ohio lies; Beneath the sunset, billowing manifold, The dark-blue hill-tops rise.

And, westering, dips the crescent of the moon Through great cloud-feathers, flushed with rosy ray, That close around the crystal of her lune The redbird wings of Day.

A little skiff slips o’er the burnished stream; A wake of flame, that broadens far behind, Follows in ripples; and the paddles gleam Against the evening wind.

Was it the boat, the solitude, and hush, That with dead Indians peopled all the glooms? That made each bank, meseemed, and every bush, Start into eagle-plumes?

That made me seem to hear the breaking brush, And, as the stag’s great antlers swelled in view, To hear the arrow twang from cane and rush, That dipped to the canoe?

To see the glimmering wigwams by the waves? And, wildly clad, around the camp-fires’ glow, The Shawnee chieftains with their painted braves, Each with his battle-bow?...

But now the vision like the sunset fades, The clouds of ribbéd gold have oozed their light; And from the west, like sombre sachem shades, Gallop the shades of night.

The broad Ohio glitters to the stars; And many murmurs wander through its woods-- Is it the mourning of dead warriors For their lost solitudes?

The moon is set; but, like another moon, The crescent of the river shimmers there, Unchanged as when the eyes of Daniel Boone Beheld it flowing fair.

THE OLD INN

Red-winding from the sleepy town, One takes the lone, forgotten lane Straight through the hills. A brush-bird brown Bubbles in thorn-flowers sweet with rain, Where breezes bend the gleaming grain And cautious drip of higher leaves The lower dips that drip again, Above the tangled trees it heaves Its gables and its haunted eaves.

One creeper, gnarled and blossomless, O’erforests all its eastern wall; The sighing cedars rake and press Dark boughs along the panes they sprawl; While, where the sun beats, drone and drawl The mud-wasps; and one bushy bee, Gold-dusty, hurls along the hall To crowd into a crack.--To me The shadows seem too scared to flee.

Of ragged chimneys martins make Huge pipes of music; twittering, here They build and brood.--My footfalls wake Strange stealing echoes, till I fear I’ll see my pale self drawing near, My phantom self as in a glass; Or one, men murdered, buried--where?-- Dim in gray, stealthy glimmer, pass With lips that seem to moan “Alas!”

THE MILL-WATER

The water-flag and wild cane grow Round banks whereon the sunbeams sow Ephemeral gold when, on its shores, The wind sighs through the sycamores.

In one green angle, just in reach, Between a willow-tree and beech, Moss-grown and leaky lies a boat The thick-grown lilies keep afloat.

And through its waters, half-awake, Slow swims the spotted water-snake; And near its edge, like some gray streak, Stands gaunt the still fly-up-the-creek.

Between the lily-pads and blooms The water-spirits set their looms, And weave the lace-like light that dims The glimmering leaves of under limbs.

Each lily is the hiding-place Of some dim wood-thing’s elvish face, That watches you with gold-green eyes Where bubbles of its breathing rise.

I fancy, when the waxing moon Leans through the trees and dreams of June; And when the black bat slants its wing, And lonelier the green-frogs sing;

I fancy, when the whippoorwill In some old tree sings wildly shrill, With glow-worm eyes that dot the dark,-- Each holding high a firefly spark,

To torch its way,--the wood-imps come: And some float rocking here; and some Unmoor the lily-leaves and oar Around the old boat by the shore.

They climb through oozy weeds and moss; They swarm its rotting sides and toss Their firefly torches o’er its edge Or hang them in the tangled sedge.

The boat is loosed. The moon is pale. Around the dam they slowly sail. Upon its bow, to pilot it, A jack-o’-lantern flame doth sit.

Yes; I have seen it all in dreams: Naught is forgotten--naught, it seems-- The strangled face, the matted hair, Drown’d, of the woman trailing there.

THE DREAM

Thus did I dream:

It seemed the afternoon Of some deep, tropic day; and yet the moon Hung, round and bright with golden alchemy, High in a heaven sapphire as the sea. Long, lawny lengths of perishable cloud Templed the west, o’er rolling forests bowed; Clouds raining colors, gold and violet, That, opening, seemed from inner worlds to let Down hints of Parian beauty and lost charms Of old romance, peopled with fairy forms. And all about me fruited orchards grew, Pear, quince, and peach, and plums of dusty blue; Rose-apricots, and apples streaked with fire, Kissed into ripeness by some sun’s desire, And big with juice. And on far, fading hills, Down which it seemed a hundred torrent rills Flashed silent silver, vines and vines and vines Terraced the world with vintage, cooling wines, Pleasant and fragrant as the heart of June, Their delicate tang drawn from the wine-white moon.

And from the clouds o’er this sweet world there dripped An odorous music, strange and feverish-lipped, That swung and swooned and panted as with sighs; Investing at each throb the air with eyes And forms of sensuous spirits, limpid white, Clad on with raiment as of starry night; Fair, frail embodiments of melody, From out whose hearts of crystal one could see The music stream like light through delicate hands Hollowing a lamp. And as on sounding sands The ocean murmur haunts the rosy shells,-- Within whose convolutions beauty dwells,-- My soul became a harp of vibrant love Reëchoing all the harmony above.

SPRING TWILIGHT

The sun set late; and left along the west A furious ruby; o’er which billowy snows Of clouds unrolled; each cloud a mighty breast Blooming with almond-rose.

The sun set late; and wafts of wind beat down, And cuffed the blossoms from the blossoming quince; Scattered the petals of the poppy’s crown, And made the clover wince.

By dusking forests, through whose fretful boughs In flying fragments shot the evening’s flame, Adown the tangled lane the quiet cows With dreamy tinklings came.

The sun set late; but scarcely had he gone When o’er the moon’s gold-litten crescent there, Bright Phosphor, polished as a precious stone, Burned in fair deeps of air.

As from faint stars the glory waned and waned, The crickets made the old-time garden shrill; Beyond the luminous pasture-lands complained The first far whippoorwill.

A SLEET-STORM IN MAY

On southern winds shot through with amber light, Breathing soft balm and clothed in cloudy white, The lily-fingered Spring came o’er the hills, Waking the crocus and the daffodils. O’er the cold Earth she breathed a tender sigh-- The maples sang and flung their banners high, Their crimson tasselled pennons, and the elm Bound his dark brows with a green-crested helm. Beneath the musky rot of last year’s leaves, Under the forest’s myriad naked eaves, Life woke and rose in gold and green and blue, Robed in the starlight of the twinkling dew. With timid tread adown the barren wood Spring held her way, when, lo! before her stood White-mantled Winter nodding his white head, Stormy his brow and stormily he said: “The God of Terror, and the King of Storm, Must I remind thee how my iron arm Raised rebel standards ’mid these conquered bowers, Turning their green to crimson?--Thou, with flowers, _Thou_ wouldst supplant me! nay! usurp my throne!-- Audacious one!”--

And at her breast he tossed A glittering spear of ice and piercing frost, And struck her down, dead on th’ unfeeling mold. The fragile blossoms, gathered in the fold Of her young bosom, fell in desolate rows About her beauty; and, like fragrant snows, Covered her lovely hands and beautiful feet, Or on her lips lay like last kisses sweet That died there. Lilacs, musky of the May, And bluer violets and snowdrops lay Entombed in crystal, icy faint and fair, Like teardrops scattered through her heavenly hair.

Alas! sad heart, break not beneath the pain! Time changeth all; the Beautiful wakes again.-- We should not question such; a higher power Knows best what bud is ripest, or what flower, Silently plucks it at the fittest hour.

THE HEART O’ SPRING

Whiten, oh, whiten, O clouds of lawn! Lily-like clouds that whiten above, Now like a dove, and now like a swan, But never, oh, never--pass on! pass on!-- Never as white as the throat of my love.

Blue-black night on the mountain peaks-- Oh, not so black as the locks o’ my love! Stars that shine through the evening’s streaks Over the torrent that flashes and breaks, Brighter the eyes of my love, my love!