A BOWER.
In the pleasant orchard closes,
“God bless all our gains,” say we;
But, “May God bless all our losses,”
Better suits with our degree.
Listen, gentle—ay, and simple!—Listen, children, on the kine!
Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played—
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade;
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms, running up from glade to glade.
There is one hill I see nearer
In my vision of the rest;
And a little wood seems clearer,
As it climbeth from the west,
Sideway from the tree-locked valley to the airy upland crest.
Small the wood is, green with hazels,
And, completing the ascent,
Where the wind blows and sun dazzles,
Thrills, in leafy tremblement,
Like a heart that after climbing beateth quickly through content.
Not a step the wood advances
O’er the open hill-top’s bound;
There in green arrest the branches
See their image on the ground:
You may walk beneath them smiling, glad with sight and glad with sound.
For you hearken on your right hand
How the birds do leap and call
In the greenwood, out of sight and
Out of reach and fear of all,
And the squirrels crack the filberts, through their cheerful madrigal.
On your left the sheep are cropping
The slant grass and daisies pale;
And fine apple-trees stand dropping
Separate shadows toward the vale,
Over which, in choral silence, the hills look you their “All hail!”
Far out, kindled by each other,
Shining hills on hills arise;
Close as brother leans to brother,
When they press beneath the eyes
Of some father praying blessings from the gifts of paradise.
While beyond, above them mounted,
And above their woods also,
Malvern hills, for mountains counted
Not unduly, loom a row—
Keepers of Piers Plowman’s visions, through the sunshine and the snow.
Yet in childhood little prized I
That fair walk and far survey;
’Twas a straight walk, unadvised by
The least mischief worth a nay—
Up and down—as dull as grammar on an eve of holiday!
But the wood, all close and clenching,
Bough in bough, and root in root—
No more sky, for over-branching,
At your head than at your foot—
Oh! the wood drew me within it, by a glamour past dispute.
Few and broken paths showed through it
Where the sheep had tried to run—
Forced with snowy wool to strew it
Round the thickets, when anon
They with silly thorn-pricked noses bleated back unto the sun.
But my childish heart beat stronger
Than those thickets dared to grow:
I could pierce them! I could longer
Travel on, methought, than so!
Sheep for sheep-paths! braver children climb and creep where they would go.
And the poets wander, said I,
Over places all as rude!
Bold Rinaldo’s lovely lady
Sat to meet him in a wood—
Rosalinda, like a fountain, laughed out pure with solitude.
And if Chaucer had not traveled
Through a forest by a well,
He had never dream’d nor marveled
At those ladies fair and fell
Who lived smiling, without loving, in their island citadel.
Thus I thought of the old singers,
And took courage from their song,
Till my little struggling fingers
Tore asunder gyve and thong
Of the lichens which entrapped me, and the barrier branches strong.
On a day, such pastime keeping,
With a fawn’s heart debonnaire,
Under-crawling, over-leaping
Thorns that prick and boughs that bear,
I stood suddenly astonished—I was gladdened unaware!
From the place I stood in floated
Back the covert dim and close,
And the open ground was coated
Carpet-smooth with grass and moss,
And the blue-bell’s purple presence signed it worthily across.
Here a linden-tree stood brightening
All adown its silver rind;
For as some trees draw the lightning,
So this tree, unto my mind,
Drew to earth the blessed sunshine, from the sky where it was shrined.
Tall the linden-tree, and near it
An old hawthorn also grew;
And wood-ivy, like a spirit,
Hovered dimly round the two,
Shaping thence that bower of beauty, which I sing of thus to you.
’Twas a bower for garden fitter
Than for any woodland wide!
Though a fresh and dewy glitter
Struck it through, from side to side,
Shaped and shaven was the freshness, as by garden-cunning plied.
Oh, a lady might have come there,
Hooded fairly, like her hawk,
With a book or lute in summer,
And a hope of sweeter talk—
Listening less to her own music, than for footsteps on the walk.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
