Nature

    I

    When the season was dry and the sun was hot
    And the hornet sucked gaunt on the apricot,
    And the ripe peach dropped to its seed a-rot,
        With a lean red wasp that stung and clung;
    When the hollyhocks, ranked in the garden-plot,
    More seed-pods had than blossoms, I wot,
        A weariness weighed on the tongue,
    That the drought of the season begot.


    II

    When the black grape bulged with the juice that burst
    Through its thick blue skin that was cracked with thirst,
    And the round gold pippins, the summer had nursed,
        In the yellowing leaves o' the orchards hung;
    When the reapers, their lips with whistling pursed,
    To their sun-tanned brows in the corn were immersed,
        A li...

At purple eyes beside the grain,
Our loves on altars we had burned,
And mixed our tribute with the dew,
Our tears, when rosy dawn returned.

Our voices we had joined with song
Of bird ecstatic, light, and free;
Our laughter rollicked with the brook
Running through darkness merrily.

At purple eyes beside the rim
Of frozen lakes our loves we burned,
And slid away when stillness reigned:
Deep the vast woods our bodies urned.

In starlit night along the shade
Of our dusk tombs our spirits glide;
We hear the echoing of the wind,
We breathe the sighs we living sighed.

    Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache,
        Plunged in this squalid city's filthy sea,
    For another ocean where the splendours break
        Blue, clear, and deep as is virginity.
    Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache?

    The sea, the sea unending, comforts us!
        What demon gave the hoarse old sea who sings
    To her mumbling hurricanes' organ thunderous
        The god-like power to cradle sorrowful things?
    The sea, the sea unending, comforts us.

    Carry me, wagon, bear me, barque, away!
        Far! Far! For here the mud is made of tears!
    Does Agatha's sad heart not sometimes say:
        "O far from shudderings and crimes and fears,
    Carry me, wagon; bear me barque, away?"

    How far thou art, O scented...

The bed of flowers

Loosens amain,
The beauteous snowdrops

Droop o'er the plain.
The crocus opens

Its glowing bud,
Like emeralds others,

Others, like blood.
With saucy gesture

Primroses flare,
And roguish violets,

Hidden with care;
And whatsoever

There stirs and strives,
The Spring's contented,

If works and thrives.

'Mongst all the blossoms

That fairest are,
My sweetheart's sweetness

Is sweetest far;
Upon me ever

Her glances light,
My song they waken,

My words make bright,
An ever open

And blooming mind,
In sport, unsullied,

In earnest, kind.
Though roses and lilies

By Summer are brought,
Against m...

Blithe dreams arise to greet us,
And life feels clean and new,
For the old love comes to meet us
In the dawning and the dew.
O'erblown with sunny shadows,
O'ersped with winds at play,
The woodlands and the meadows
Are keeping holiday.
Wild foals are scampering, neighing,
Brave merles their hautboys blow:
Come! let us go a-maying
As in the Long-Ago.

Here we but peak and dwindle:
The clank of chain and crane,
The whir of crank and spindle
Bewilder heart and brain;
The ends of our endeavour
Are merely wealth and fame,
Yet in the still Forever
We're one and all the same;
Delaying, still delaying,
We watch the fading west:
Come! let us go a-maying,
Nor fear to take the best.

Yet beautiful and spacious
The wis...

O! were I one of the Olympian twelve,
Their godships should pass this into law,
That when a man doth set himself in toil
After some beauty veiled far away,
Each step he took should make his lady's hand
More soft, more white, and her fair cheek more fair;
And for each briar-berry he might eat,
A kiss should bud upon the tree of love,
And pulp and ripen richer every hour,
To melt away upon the traveller's lips.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1.
The sun, with his great eye,
Sees not so much as I;
And the moon, all silve-proud,
Might as well be in a cloud.

2.
And O the spring the spring!
I lead the life of a king!
Couch'd in the teeming grass,
I spy each pretty lass.

3.
I look where no one dares,
And I st...

For a Very Little Girl, Not a Year Old.Catharine Frazee Wakefield.



    The sun gives not directly
        The coal, the diamond crown;
    Not in a special basket
        Are these from Heaven let down.

    The sun gives not directly
        The plough, man's iron friend;
    Not by a path or stairway
        Do tools from Heaven descend.

    Yet sunshine fashions all things
        That cut or burn or fly;
    And corn that seems upon the earth
        Is made in the hot sky.

    The gravel of the roadbed,
        The metal of the gun,
    The engine of the airship
        Trace somehow from the sun.

    And so your soul, my lady -
        (Mere sunshine, nothing more) -
    Prepares me the contraptions...

There's a place in the North where the bonnie broom grows,
Where winding through green meadows the silver Maine flows,
Every lark as it soars and sings that sweet spot knows;
                For the mate for whom it sings,
                Till the clear blue heaven rings,
Is brooding on its nest mid the daisies in the grass;
                And that psalmist sweet, the thrush,
                And the linnet in the bush,
Tell the children all their secrets in song as they pass.

Oh brightly shines the sun there where wee birdies sing,
A glamour's o'er the buds in the green lap of spring,
In happy, happy laughter children's voices ring!
                Like some fair enchanted ground,
                In memory it is found,
Where my childhood's golden hours of happine...

When the wind storms by with a shout, and the stern sea-caves
Exult in the tramp and the roar of onsetting waves,
Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life
Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife,
Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before,
When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore,
Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong,
Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song,
O you envy the blessed dead that can live no more!

Out of the bosom of the Air,
    Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
    Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
    Silent, and soft, and slow
    Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
    Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
    In the white countenance confession,
    The troubled sky reveals
    The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
    Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
    Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
    Now whispered and revealed
    To wood and field.

In a fair and sunny forest glade
    O'erarched with chesnuts old,
Through which the radiant sunbeams made
    A network of bright gold,
A girl smiled softly to herself,
    And dreamed the hours away;
Lulled by the sound of the murmuring brook
    With the summer winds at play.

Jewels gleamed not in the tresses fair
    That fell in shining showers,
Naught decked that brow of beauty rare
    But a wreath of forest flowers;
And the violet wore no deeper blue
    Than her own soft downcast eye,
Whilst her bright cheek with the rose's hue
    In loveliness well might vie.

But she was too fair to bloom unknown
    By forest or valley side,
And long ere two sunny years had flown,
    The girl was a wealthy bride -
Removed to so high...

Oh boy, down there, I can't believe that what they say is true!
We squirrels surely cannot have an enemy in you;
We have so much in common, my dear friend, it seems to me
That I can really feel for you, and you can feel for me.

Some human beings might not understand the life we lead;
If we asked Dr. Birch to play, no doubt he'd rather read;
He hates all scrambling restlessness, and chattering, scuffling noise;
If he could catch us we should fare no better than you boys.

Fine ladies, too, whose flounces catch and tear on every stump,
What joy have they in jagged pines, who neither skip nor jump?
Miss Mittens never saw my tree-top home--so unlike hers;
What wonder if her only thought of squirrels is of furs?

But you, dear boy, you know so well the bliss of climbin...

            Sweetheart Spring

    Our Sweetheart, Spring, came softly,
    Her gliding hands were fire,
    Her lilac breath upon our cheeks
    Consumed us with desire.

    By her our God began to build,
    Began to sow and till.
    He laid foundations in our loves
    For every good and ill.
    We asked Him not for blessing,
    We asked Him not for pain -
    Still, to the just and unjust
    He sent His fire and rain.


            Sweetheart Summer

    We prayed not, yet she came to us,
    The silken, shining one,
    On Jacob's noble ladder
    Descended from the sun.
    She reached our town of Every Day,
    Our dry and dusty sod -
    We prayed not, yet she brought to us
    The misty wine of Go...

From where I lingered in a lull in march
outside the sugar-house one night for choice,
I called the fireman with a careful voice
And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:
'O fireman, give the fire another stoke,
And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.'
I thought a few might tangle, as they did,
Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare
Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,
And so be added to the moon up there.
The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.
The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.
They were content to figure in the trees
As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.
And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

The nodding oxeye bends before the wind,
The woodbine quakes lest boys their flowers should find,
And prickly dogrose spite of its array
Can't dare the blossom-seeking hand away,
While thistles wear their heavy knobs of bloom
Proud as a warhorse wears its haughty plume,
And by the roadside danger's self defy;
On commons where pined sheep and oxen lie
In ruddy pomp and ever thronging mood
It stands and spreads like danger in a wood,
And in the village street where meanest weeds
Can't stand untouched to fill their husks with seeds,
The haughty thistle oer all danger towers,
In every place the very wasp of flowers.

Thou art my morning, twilight, noon, and eve,
    My Summer and my Winter, Spring and Fall;
    For Nature left on thee a touch of all
The moods that come to gladden or to grieve
The heart of Time, with purpose to relieve
    From lagging sameness. So do these forestall
    In thee such o'erheaped sweetnesses as pall
Too swiftly, and the taster tasteless leave.

Scenes that I love to me always remain
    Beautiful, whether under summer's sun
Beheld, or, storm-dark, stricken across with rain.
    So, through all humors, thou 'rt the same sweet one:
Doubt not I love thee well in each, who see
Thy constant change is changeful constancy.

I.


A spirit haunts the year’s last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.



II.

The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the year’s last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower<...

A sea of foliage girds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green,
Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen;
The light-green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mangoe clumps of green profound,
And palms arise, like pillars gray, between;
And o'er the quiet pools the seemuls lean,
Red,--red, and startling like a trumpet's sound.
But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges
Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon
Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden, in amaze.