Part 2

Within the world awake behold A world asleep ... the wildwood shades! With limbs of glimmering coolness lolled Along the purple forest glades:-- Sleep in each unremembering face, The sea-worn Greeks knew these of old, And named “the lotus-eating race.”

Within the life asleep I mark A life awake; a life intense, That spurs the sap beneath the bark With tender hints of violence, The liquid germs of leaf and bud, And in the ponderable dark Fulfils the offices of blood.

O wiser than Thy works!--behind Thy works,--who shall behold Thy place? Beyond the suns whose beams burn blind Before the glory of Thy face!-- Among the least of worlds, shall we Presume to give to Thee, defined, A place and personality!

XII

Across the hills, that roll and rise Beneath the blue, adoring skies, Maturing Beauty by the old, Dark forest stands, as might a slave Before a Sultan sitting grave, Grim-gazing from a throne of gold.

Across the hills, that rise and fall, I gaze with eyes grown spiritual, And see the Spirit of the Dew From out the morn, that stains the mist With amber and with amethyst, Blown, bubble-bright, along the blue.

What king such kingly pomp can show As on the hills the afterglow? Where ’mid red woods the maples sit, Like scarlet-mantled sagamores, Who, from their totemed wigwam doors, Watch, through red fires, the ghost-dance flit.

At night, as comes the fox, shall come The Spirit of the Frost, whose thumb Shall squeeze the chestnut burs, and press Each husk bare; whisper every flower Such tales of death that in an hour It dies of utter happiness.

Until the moon sets I shall walk, And listen how the woodlands talk Of bygone lovely nights and days: My soul, made silent intimate Of all their sorrow, soon and late A portion of the autumn haze.

XIII

What revelations fill with song The cycles? and to what belong Life’s far convictions of the light? Through which the spirit waxeth strong, The darkling soul surmounts the night, By builded rainbows, to some height Near mountain stars of Truth and Right, Beyond the vulture-wing of Wrong?--

To Nature! who adjusts the deeps Of her soul’s needs to man’s; and keeps Such grave response as grief shall hear When on her heart it sinks and weeps; For every gladness, clean and clear Its glad reflection lying near-- The wild accord of hope and fear Which in her inmost bosom sleeps.

XIV

The mallow, like an Elfland moon, Along the stream gleams grottoed gold; Its bell-shaped blossom seems to hold All the lost beauty of last June. September’s mist haunts, white and cold, The windings of the forest stream, As death might haunt a thought or dream.

And who with idle words hath stood, With idle thoughts, and gazed into The face of one he loved and knew, Dying in all her womanhood? No words, but silence, then will do, No thoughts but help the heart to hear: So seems it with the fading year.

XV

The snowy flutter of a hand Seems beckoning in the morning mist, And from the mist a jewelled wrist Of dew now waves us a command: And in the skies, behold! the Land Of Far-away-beyond-the-dawn, Where, crowned with roses wild and wan, The Futures of the World speed on.

Along the eve a fiery arm Now points us to the waning west, And all the sorrow, that oppressed Our hearts once, straight becomes a charm Of beauty, whose dim spells transform The Present to the Long-ago, All grief to joy,--or seeming so,-- We see through thaumaturgic glow.

XVI

Pearl-lilac blent with pearly rose, The dawn bloomed slowly out of dusk,-- As some huge cactus from its husk Bursts vast a bloom whose chalice glows A grotto of transmuted dyes;-- Such wild, auroral light as flows On ice-peaks from unearthly skies.

Dove-purple shifting into shades Of opal,--like the tints which dwell With fire in the ocean-shell,-- The sunset flashed above the glades Through skies of nacre and of flame;-- Such supernatural light as braids Dim coral caves, that have no name.

XVII

Draw from thine eyes the veil that hides Ideal visions; beckonings Of loveliness, whose soul abides Beneath the commonplace of things: No brook within the woodland then But shows its sparkling god to thee; Upon the ancient hills no tree Whose whispering spirit thou shalt not see, Fairer than children born of men. Refine thy flesh that never hears The inner music of all things,-- The deaf flesh,--from thy spirit’s ears, And list the vaster voice that sings With pregnant lips unto the Earth: Mornings, who hymn with gold the sky, To which the eves with gold reply-- The everlasting heavens that cry The visible psalms of death and birth.

XVIII

The flowers of the fall I seek: The purple aster,--like a gauze Of pearl,--beneath the nodding haws Or making gay each tangled creek: The hairy, small herb-Robert, lost,-- Yet seen,--among the weeds which crush Or crowd it, with its bluish blush; Its rough, low stalk stung red with frost.

Around the rail-fence, climbing up, The nightshade hangs rich berries down,-- Clusters of cochineal,--that drown The flowering bind-weed’s pendant cup: And where the boggy bottom sets Its burs as breastworks and as tents, Like bivouacking regiments, The cat-tails stack their bayonets.

From amaranth--in tree and flower-- To asphodel-in weed and bloom-- The season swings a magic loom Of sun and mist from hour to hour: In its wide warp it weaves the dyes Of morning’s brilliant blue and gray; And crimson through the weft of day Flings the wild woof of evening skies.

XIX

What intimations made them wise, The mournful pine, the mighty beech? Some strange and esoteric speech-- (Communicated from the skies In secret whispers)--that invokes The boles that sleep within the seeds, And out of narrow darkness leads The vast assemblies of the oaks.

Within his knowledge, what one reads The poems written by the flowers? The sermons, past all speech that’s ours, Preached in the gospel of the weeds?-- O eloquence of coloring! O thoughts of syllabled perfume! O beauty uttered into bloom! Teach me your dreams so I may sing!

XX

What time the great lobelia fills The wildwood with the blue of spring-- And asters, scattered o’er the hills, Bloom, starry-sown, through everything-- My fancy takes me wandering, My fancy, clothed in daffodils.

In lavender lights, which sleep among The ferns, my heart is at a loss To find the love that leads along Down magic ways of tufted moss-- Now, like the brook, it calls across, Now, like a bird, it lures with song.

It leads me to the land which lies Within a world no man can see; Wherein the Elfland cities rise, Faint haunts of musk and melody; That with the butterfly and bee And congregated flowers are wise.

XXI

Upon the Earth what hints are rife, Of life when change hath left us still! When death within us doth fulfil Its end, whose part is one with life! What hints, which tell us not alone Immortal is the spirit, for Flesh too,--corruption can but mar,-- The incorruptible puts on.

The blood but fills a part that’s higher Of color, and pervades all flowers; The brain informs the twinkling hours With dreams of resurrected fire; The heart performs the function of A fragrance; and the countenance Lends new expression to, perchance, The face of beauty that we love.

XXII

Oh, joy, to walk the way that goes Through woods of sweet-gum and of beech! Where, like a ruby left in reach, The berry of the dogwood glows: Or where the bristling hillsides mass, ’Twixt belts of tawny sassafras, Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows!

Where, in the hazy morning, runs The stony branch that pools and drips, The red-haws and the wild-rose hips Are strewn like pebbles; and the sun’s Own gold seems captured by the weeds; To see, through scintillating seeds, The hunters steal with glimmering guns!

Oh, joy, to go the path which lies Through woodlands where the trees are tall! Beneath the misty moon of fall, Whose ghostly girdle prophesies A morn wind-swept and gray with rain; When, o’er the lonely, leafy lane, The night-hawk, like a dead leaf, flies!

To stand within the dewy ring Where pale death smites the boneset blooms, And everlasting’s flowers, and plumes Of mint, with aromatic wing! And hear the creek,--whose sobbing seems A wild man murmuring in his dreams,-- And insect violins that sing! Or where the dim persimmon-tree Rains on the path its frosty fruit, And in the oak the owl doth hoot, Beneath the moon and mist, to see The outcast Year come,--Hagar-wise,-- With far-off, melancholy eyes, And lips that thirst for sympathy!

XXIII

Along my mind flies suddenly A wildwood thought that will not die, That makes me brother to the bee, And cousin to the butterfly: A thought, such as gives perfume to The blushes of the bramble-rose, And, fixed in quivering crystal, glows A captive in the prismed dew.

It leads the feet no certain way, No frequent path of human feet: Its wild eyes follow me all day, All day I hear its wild heart beat: And in the night it sings and sighs The songs the winds and waters love; Its wild heart lying tranced above, And tranced the wildness of its eyes.

XXIV

With eyes that seem to ache with tears I look beyond the twilight fields: The stars swing down their shimmering shields, And fill the phalanx of their spears. I can not see, I only know A flower dies beneath my feet; The fragrance of its death is sweet And bitter as my heart’s own woe.

With thoughts that find not what they seek I question Earth and Heaven, and find That they are dark and I am blind, And in my blindness very weak. I do not know, I only feel Behind all death a purpose stands, With hallowed and magnetic hands, Beneficent and strong to heal.

XXV

These, too, shall tell me what my heart, And what my soul desireth:-- The flowers, that bloom serene for death, The stars, that know no mortal part. One shall inspire my heart with acts Of life so that the death responds; One to the soul breathe higher facts Of death that shall annul such bonds.

Sufficient for my love these terms, Beyond my understanding’s scope: I merely know all life must grope Not downward from its darkling germs. Sufficient for my faith is such: That, in the narrow night that binds The seed, its life shall feel in touch With light above it seeks and finds.

XXVI

Beyond the violet-colored hill The golden, deepening daffodil Of dusk bloomed on heav’n’s window-sill: And, drifting west, the crescent moon Gleamed like a sword of Scanderoon A khedive dropped on floors of gold; Near which,--one loosened gem that rolled Out of the jewelled scimitar,-- Glittered and shone the evening-star.

Behind the trees, where, darkly deep As indigo, the shadows sleep,-- As if the Titan world would heap A throne with purple for its god, Whose pomp comes with vermilion shod-- The west, ’thwart which the wild-ducks fly, Burns, richer than the orient dye Phœnician vessels brought from Tyre, Deep, murex-stained, with carmine fire.

The light dies down; the skies grow gray: The sear, dark forests sound and sway: The ashen rain-clouds roll this way. The green grig in the withered weeds Sings, and the wild snipe seeks the reeds. With hurling winds,--that seem to wail Like Demon Huntsmen,--dark with hail And rain, which blot the cabin’s light, Comes on the wild autumnal night.

XXVII

There is a rushing in the woods, The autumn-haunted solitudes, When night comes in with winds that sweep The wild rain from the hills; and reap The roaring harvest of the leaves With unseen scythes Death stalks behind, And Desolation, fierce and blind, Heaping the storm’s tumultuous sheaves. There is a sighing in the woods, The hills of autumn solitudes, When on the night, the winds have strewn With crowding clouds, the stormy moon Bursts like a herald shouting _Cease!_ Through darkness o’er a battlefield Of Hell; the splendor of his shield Inscribed with silence and with peace.

XXVIII

The storm,--that makes the sky its own, And smites its spirit through Earth’s nerves, And, like an instrument which serves High purposes to us unknown Of song that knows not that it sings,-- Itself is all majestic things Imagination forms or feels; Itself all wonders it reveals To thought, which knows but semblances Of such concealed realities.

The star, that flames through storm and crowds An instant with its utterance Of silence and serene romance, And glides again into the clouds, Shone for some present end; and filled A moment’s need as Heaven willed:-- A thought, some dreamer labored for, Immaculate as is a star; A hope, some weary watcher read Pale in the loved face of his dead.

XXIX

Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung Its thorny balls among the weeds, And where the milkweed’s sleepy seeds,-- A fairy Feast of Lanterns,--swung; The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre, And o’er the hills the sunset hung A purple parchment scrawled with fire.

From silver-blue to amethyst The shadows broadened in the vale; And, belt by belt, the pearly pale Aladdin fabric of the mist Stretched its vague exhalation far; A jewel on an Afrit’s wrist, One star gemmed sunset’s cinnabar.

Then night drew near, as when, alone, The heart and soul grow intimate; And on the hills the twilight sate With shadows, whose wild robes were sown With dreams and whispers--dreams, that led The heart once with love’s monotone, And whispers of the living dead.

XXX

Of life and of eternity These are the dreams that came to me: The one:--A whitened whirl of sea; A gallows beetling through the rains, And, tossing in its rusty chains, Carrion upon the gallows-tree: Gaunt ravens swarm above and tear Long strips from shrivelled skin and hair: A ship hurls pounding on the rocks: Wild minute-guns boom through the spume And crashing surf: out of the gloom The strangled dead leers down and mocks.

An incorporeal solitude, Which darkness out of darkness hewed, The other dream: Enormous deeps Of naught, where ancient Silence sleeps, The eldest of Heav’n’s Titan brood:-- In unilluminated night, Vast and insufferable white, A summit soars: its light, which dyes Not darkness, of itself is born: Around its splendor, as in scorn, Night’s dark, defiant chaos lies.

XXXI

Past midnight, gathering from the west, With rolling rain the storm came on, And tore and tossed until the dawn, Like some dark demon of unrest: The stairways creaked! the chimneys boomed; I heard the wild leaves blown about The windy windows; and the shout Of forests that the storm had doomed.

I listened, and remembered how On yesterday I went alone A sunlit path through fields o’ergrown With sumac brakes, turned crimson now; Where asters strung blue pearls and white Beside the goldenrod’s soft ruff; Where thistles, silvery puff on puff, Danced many a twinkling witch’s-light.

Her joy the Autumn uttered so To skies where gold and azure blent; Now storm is the embodiment Of all her utterance of woe: The two within me so abide, That of the two my mind partakes,-- As one, who walks asleep, awakes, Walks on and thinks, “To-night I died.”

XXXII

What sympathies of Heaven and Earth The human ego enters in! The universal stain of sin Which qualifies it from its birth, Denying it their highest worth. There is a parallel of kin ’Twixt earth and man, that dignifies Endeavor with such sympathies.

The all mysterious wisdom waits In mountain, wood, and waterfall, Sky, rock and sea, to hear the call Of something--firmer than the Fates-- Deep in the soul it elevates; And to the splendor of the All Advances, through the night’s immense, The spirit of experience. So think I now while, long and loud, The wind its maniac music beats, And storm a madman’s song repeats To echoes in the rushing cloud; While all the world to wrath is vowed, And nothing conquers or defeats The darkness and the rain that raves Above the all-unheeding graves.

XXXIII

All night the rain-gusts shook the leaves Around my window; and the blast Rumbled the flickering flue, and fast The storm streamed from the dripping eaves. As if--’neath skies gone mad with fear-- The witches’ Sabboth galloped past, The forests leapt like startled deer.

All night I heard the sweeping sleet; And when the morning came, as slow As pale affliction, with the woe Of all the world dragged at her feet, No spear of purple shattered through The dark-gray of the east; no bow Of gold, whose arrows cleft the blue.

But rain, that whipped the windows; filled The spouts with rushing; and around The garden stamped, and sowed the ground With limbs and leaves; the wood-pool filled With overgurgling.--Bleak and cold The fields looked, where the foot-path wound Through teasel and bur-marigold....

Yet there is kindness in such days Of gloom, that doth console regret With sympathy of tears, which wet Old eyes that watch the back-log blaze-- A kindness, alien to the deep Glad blue of sunny days that let No thought in of the lives that weep.

XXXIV

This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers,-- As might a face within our sleep, With stone-gray eyes that weep and weep, And wet brows bound with sodden flowers,-- Is sunset to some sister land; A land of ruins and of palms; Rich sunset, crimson with long calms,-- Whose burning belt low mountains bar,-- That sees some brown Rebecca stand Beside a well the camel-band Winds down to ’neath the evening-star.

O sunset, sister to this dawn! O dawn, whose face is turned away! Who gazest not upon this day, But back upon the day that’s gone! Enamored so of loveliness, The retrospect of what thou wast, Oh, to thyself the present trust! And as thy past make beautiful With hues, that never can grow less! Waiting thy pleasure to express New beauty, lest the world grow dull.

XXXV

At daybreak from the woodland come Echoes of hunting; or the chop Of some far woodman’s axe, that cleaves The tingling oak, whose russet leaves Drop slowly where the white chips drop: The air is fragrant with the loam, Where, through the mists of steaming gold, The sudden sun strikes fold on fold. Out of the window, filmed with fog, I look into the wreck which was The kitchen-garden, drenched with rain; Among the death I mark again One blue convolvulus--that draws A gray vignette along a log, With pencilled tendrils washed and wan-- The garden-story’s colophon.

XXXVI

More storm than calm, less gold than gray, Along the years our lives must tread, Makes sad the scenes around our way, Makes grave the heavens overhead: For on life’s storied page, behold, Are adumbrations of the dead! The neutral tint Time’s fingers lay Around a tale that’s never told.

Time writes with sunshine less than rain, With starlight less than mist, the scroll-- A thousand memories of pain To one of joy--of his own soul: The golden hues of life occur In his dim palimpsest, whose whole Death scrawls with dusty lines again, Making of all a leaden blur.

XXXVII

Down in the woods a sorcerer, Out of rank rain and death, distils,-- Through chill alembics of the air,-- Aromas that brood everywhere Among the dingles of the hills: The bitter myrrh of dead leaves fills Wet valleys (where the gaunt weeds bleach) With sodden scents of wood decay;-- As if a spirit all the day Sat breathing softly ’neath the beech.

With other eyes I see her flit, The wood-witch of the wild perfumes, Among her sleepy owls,--that sit, A fluffy white, in crescent-lit Dim glens and opalescent glooms:-- Where, for her magic, buds and blooms Mysterious perfumes, while she stands, A fragrant shadow, summoning The eery odors that take wing, Like bubbles, from her rainy hands.

XXXVIII

With leagues of fog, which showed the sun An agate-red without a ray, And drowned the world in ghostly gray, The chill, autumnal day begun: A phantom in the mist, a run Foamed over phantom ledges lone In forests that seemed far away, Wild woods of immaterial stone.

With horses saffron to the knees A country cart drove through the fog; Its creaking wheels grown one great clog Of clay, and clanking swingletrees: Its smothered rumble did not cease Till hidden in the woodland mist, Where, leaning on his fresh-cut log, The muffled woodman blew his fist.

Another world I wander in Of unlaid ghosts and dreams unfled; A twilight world of drowsy-head And mystery, built figment-thin Between the worlds of death and sin: Where dim and strange and incomplete, And substanceless, seem things not dead, And sorrowful as dimly sweet.

XXXIX

Among the woods they call to me-- The lights that haunt the strand and stream; Voices of such white ecstasy As moves with hushed lips through a dream: They stand in nimbused radiances, Or flash with glittering limbs across Their golden shadows on the moss, Or slip in silver through the trees.

What love can give the heart in me More hope and exaltation than The hand of light that tips the tree And beckons far from marts of man? That reaches foamy fingers through The broken ripple, and replies With sparkling speech of lips and eyes To souls who seek and still pursue.

XL

Oh, bright the day, and calm and cool With clouds, like cotton-fields that swoon Beneath the silver summer moon; And, quiet as a forest pool,-- Where Autumn sits and combs her locks, And strews with rainbow leaves and roon,-- The shadows rest upon the rocks.

The sun pours airy amber on The withered wood-ways, where the late Green-crickets’ shell-like wings vibrate: And, fainter than lost lines of dawn, The fields shine labyrinthed with rays, With gossamer-webs, that imitate Cloud-figments, or a splintered haze.

Beyond the yarrow’s meekness now, Wood-sorrel’s lowliness, and shy Hepatica’s humility, The Year is grown: makes brave her brow With crowning crimson of the lands, And robes her limbs in cardinal dye, And by the lonely waters stands.

XLI