2.
The hips were reddening on the rose,
The haws hung slips of fire;
We went the woodland way that goes
Up hills of branch and briar.
The hooked thorn held her gown and seemed
Imploring her be staying
The sunlight of herself that beamed
Beside it gently swaying.
Low bent the golden saxifrage;
Its yellow bells like bangles
The foxglove fluttered. Like a page—
From out the rail-fence angles—
With crimson plume the sumach, hosed
In Lincoln green, attended
My lady of the elder, posed
In blue-black jewels splendid.
And as we mounted up the hill
The rocky path that stumbled
Spread smooth; and all the day was still
And odorous with umbled
Tops of wild-carrots drying gray;
And there, soft-sunned before us,
An orchard dwindling away
With dappled boughs bent o'er us.
An orchard where the pippin fell
Worm-bitten, bruised, and dusty;
And hornet-stung, each like a bell,
The Bartlett ripened rusty;
The smell of tawny peach and plum,
That offered luscious yellow;
Of wasp and bee the hidden hum,
Made all the warm air mellow.
And on we went where many-hued
Hung wild the morning-glory,
Their blue balloons in shadows, dewed
With frost-white dew-drops hoary;
In bush and burgrass far away
Beneath us stretched the valley,
Cleft by one creek that laughed with day
And babbled musically.
The brown, the bronze, the gray, the red
Of weed and briar ran riot
Flush to dark woodland walls that led
To nooks of whispering quiet.
Long, feathering bursts of golden-rod
Ran golden woolly patches—
Bloom-sunsets of the withered sod
The dying summer catches.
Then o'er the hills, loose-tumbling rolled—
O'erleaping expectation—
The sunset, flaming marigold,
A system's conflagration:
And homeward turning, she and I
Went as one self in being—
God met us in the earth and sky
And Love had purged our seeing.