A SHEAF OF NATURE-SONGS

(Overstrand, 1905.)

They were gathered up in the moods

Which I found in the solitudes

Of the shore and the fields and the woods,

Of the dawn and the noon and the even,

Of the earth and the sea and of heaven.

And some lack rhythm and metre,

And none of the songs is sweeter,

Or as sweet (by the infinite span

Which divides the work of man

From the work of his God), as the thing

Which was the fountain and spring

Whence my heart drew its need to sing.

But because wherever I went

Much song in my heart was pent:

Because the sea and the sky

Filled my breast with such melody:

Because the woodlands and all

God's earth became musical

As they entered into my soul:

Because I captured the whole

Of Nature for my possession:

I sang just to find expression

For the joy and the love and the pride of it—

Else all song in me might have died of it.

The infinite sky overhead

And on the horizon

The infinite sea.

Green billowing grass for my bed—

At last I am out of my prison

And free!

An insect creeps over my page,

An infinite mite

With all life folded under its wings.

I am of no sex, of no age,

Here out of sight

Of the world, all alone with God's infinite things.

Oh, the world of small leafage

Peopling the bank where I lean,

And the one white daisy

With its wisdom of things supernal.

They live out their brief age,

Brief but eternal,

And time itself recedes and grows hazy

In this little infinite world of green.

Behind me the copse

Like a round cup dips

Filled with a pool of soft shadows,

And to me in the meadows

One shy bird-voice from the tree-top drips

And into the hollow of shadows it melts and drops.

They are all around me

And all above me,

Half-seen, half-heard,

Flower and leaf and insect and bird,

Wild, timid creatures,

Simple and friendly and shy;

And so still I lie

Where they have found me

That I think in time they may learn to love me,

For they are Nature's

And so am I.

One by one she unfolds each feature,

The Infinite Mother

To her child.

There was a new bird-call,

And there was another!

I too shall learn to grow simple and shy and wild ...

Only Nature and Nature and nothing but Nature,

And I alone in the heart of it all.

III

They who dwell in the southlands say,

Little green England of mine, that you

Are misty and colourless, cold and grey.

If it be true

And they can know it who dwell afar,

You only are grey as diamonds are.

To-day in the warm soft evening light

You are a zone of delicate tints;

On the rim of the sea the sun is bright,

And shoots and glints

Sparkles of gold through its splendid blue.

Who say you are colourless know not you.

Opal gleams on the sunset sky

Where a wave of the liquid sapphire flows;

One bright cloud on its flood drifts by

Of pearl and rose;

The air is radiant and crystalline

As rare jewels delved from a fairy mine.

A breeze just shivers the green of the corn

And sweeps it into a silver sea;

Infinite sensitive shades new-born

On hill and lea

Over the land's lap flit and pass

Like elusive tints in Venetian glass

Nature has painted you in pastel,

You are her palette of tender hues,

Little green England of mine, where dwell

Change, and infuse,

The million lights of the polar-star,

And you only are grey as diamonds are.

If I could unravel

The music of the grass,

Beyond those confines travel

Which mortals cannot pass,

I think that I should capture all

The secret of things musical—

All music ever will be, and all it ever was.

Ear close to earth inclining

I hear her wordless song

Of threads past man's divining

Woven the grass among.

Beneath these fragrant, tangled weeds

She sings the strain to which her seeds

March into life, push upward to heaven, and grow strong.

Then like a voice replying

Follows her cradle-croon

Lulling tired things that, dying,

Back to their Mother swoon.

For where the worlds of grasses spring

Both life and death their choral sing,

The spheres' eternal roundel circling an afternoon.

The music of existence

Moves underneath my ear—

From how remote a distance

Comes that which sounds so near!

Could I the human barrier pass

By the fine measure of one grass

I then might comprehend what now I only hear.

There's such melodious stirring

Of hidden, secret things,

There's such harmonious whirring

Of faint mysterious wings;

And underneath this leaf is curled

The song, I think, of all the world—

Up-turned, should I discover the seed from which it springs?

If I could unravel

The music of the grass,

Beyond those confines travel

Which mortals cannot pass,

I think that I should capture all

The secret of things musical—

All music ever will be, and all it ever was.

Hark!

It is afternoon,

Yet that must be a lark.

No other bird flies up so high

And shakes its sparkling spray of song

Through the grey clouds in the sky,

No other bird has just that thrilling

Note in trilling,

Or can sustain so long

Its liquid flood of mirth:

As rare a boon

To thirsty ears as God's dew is to earth.

Yet it is afternoon.

I thought the larks, all scorning

The jaded hours, sang only in the morning.

And I, whose first flushed youth is going,

Who watch the swift noon growing

Upon me, hour by hour,

Feeling that I must always stand apart

From earth's sweet singers, because I lacked the pow'r

To loose the morning song-burst from my heart—

Oh, songster of the mellowing hour of day,

Shall I, too, late or soon,

Learn from your throat the way

To loose my power of song even in my afternoon?

The day was a lifeless day.

Under a tree I lay

And round me its branches bent

Touching the earth like a tent.

There was no stir of breeze;

I was shut in with trees,

Locked from the world by these;

Dead leaves were piled on the ground,

And the forest lay in a swound,

Throbbed with nor pulse nor breath,

And I thought: "It is waiting Death."

So I lay there, still and oppressed,

While the silence grew in my breast.

Presently as I lay

I heard from far away

Little pattering feet

Over the dry leaves beat;

Tripping along pell-mell,

Thicker and faster they fell

Than tongue could count or tell.

And I fancied the birds and deer

And rabbits, too awed for fear,

Were creeping my aid to plead

Impelled by our common need—

Till into my sheltered place

One raindrop splashed on my face.

I lay there tented and dry

While the dews, dropped out of the sky,

Made music upon the sheaves

Of last year's stacked-up leaves—

No steps of wild things that trod,

But the whispering voice of God

In grave commune with the sod,

Messenger-angels rife

With words not of Death but Life,

Bidding the old brown Earth

Prepare for her great re-birth

And look to Heaven in pride

Renewed and revivified.

Then I heard far under the soil

The seedlings stir and toil,

And blade and bulb and root

Put forth each one new shoot,

And I felt deep down and deep

A million pulses leap

Out of their term of sleep,

And I thought the acorn spoke

With the voice of the full-grown oak,

And the cone wore the crown divine

Of the red-stemmed, crested pine,

And the haw held all the blush

And bloom of the wild-rose bush.

What helped these young things to grow?

Dead leaves of a year ago,

Leaves heaped up in their crowds

And spread like funeral-shrouds;

Yet life sprang out of their death

As the blade slips out of its sheath,

Life was fostered beneath

The leaves here rotting away

And emerged from their decay.

Are all things that seem to die

Renewed to infinity,

And the bodies and souls of men

Made and re-made again?

With the scent of the rain-wet loam

In my nostrils, I turned me home.

VII

I lay on the shore beside the sea,

And the young moon climbed the hill of the sky

And paused a space to look down on me

Alone with my misery

Then on the fallow blue fields above

The young moon sowed its seed of stars;

Light gleamed from the mirror of her named Love

And flashed from the shield of Mars.

The stars sprang up from the silver seed

Wherever that silver sower trod.

Through the windows of heaven watching my need

I knew them the eyes of God.

Little blue waves with blown foam capped

Crept on the solitary shore

Which the sea's white lips still licked and lapped

For ever and evermore.

The silver moon waxed strong and older;

I thought I saw it stop to fling

A silver sickle over its shoulder

And commence its harvesting.

The strong moon ploughed through the fields of heaven,

Its eternal labour but half-begun.

My breast dropped its load of earthy leaven

As the stars dropped one by one.

I had sat there hugging my trivial cross,

My infinitesimal mortal pains,

Reckoning up how my mortal loss

Outmeasured my mortal gains.

I saw the moon reaping God's blue fields

Night after night sown thick with seeds.

I saw the crop which God's harvest yields

Not in men's dreams, but deeds.

The old moon climbed down the hill of the sky,

The strong young day flashed up in flame.

The moon dropped into the sea, and I

Bowed down my head in shame.