ODE TO FIRST OF APRIL.
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Mindful of disaster past,
And shrinking at the northern blast,
The sleety storm returning still,
The morning hoar, and evening chill,
Reluctant comes the timid spring.
Scarce a bee, with airy ring,
Murmurs the blossom’d boughs around,
That clothe the garden’s southern bound;
Scarce a sickly, straggling flower
Decks the rough castle’s rifted tower;
Scarce the hardy primrose peeps
From the dark dell’s entangled steeps;
O’er the fields of waving broom
Slowly shoots the golden bloom;
And, but by fits, the furze-clad dale
Tinctures the transitory gale;
While from the shrubbery’s naked maze,
Where the vegetable blaze
Of Flora’s brightest 'broidery shone,
Every checker’d charm is flown;
Save that the lilac hangs to view
Its bursting gems in clusters blue.
Scant along the ridgy land
The beans their new-born ranks expand;
The fresh-turn’d soil, with tender blades,
Thinly the sprouting barley shades:
Fringing the forest’s devious edge,
Half-rob’d appears the hawthorn hedge;
Or to the distant eye displays,
Weakly green its budding sprays.
The swallow, for a moment seen,
Skims in haste the village green;
From the gray moor, on feeble wing,
The screaming plovers idly spring;
The butterfly, gay-painted, soon
Explores awhile the tepid noon,
And fondly trusts its tender dyes
To fickle suns and flattering skies.
Fraught with a transient, frozen shower,
If a cloud should haply lower,
Sailing o’er the landscape dark,
Mute on a sudden is the lark;
But when gleams the sun again
O’er the pearl-besprinkled plain,
And from behind his watery vail,
Looks through the thin descending hail;
She mounts, and, lessening to the sight,
Salutes the blithe return of light;
And high her tuneful track pursues,
'Mid the dim rainbow’s scattered hues.
Where, in venerable rows,
Widely-waving oaks disclose
The moat of yonder antique hall,
Swarm the rooks with clamorous call;
And to the toils of nature true,
Wreath their capacious nests anew.
Musing through the lawny park,
The lonely poet loves to mark
How various greens in faint degrees
Tinge the tall groups of various trees;
While, careless of the changing year,
The pine cerulean, never sere,
Towers distinguish’d from the rest,
And proudly vaunts her winter vest.
Within some whispering osier isle,
Where Glynn’s low banks neglected smile,
And each trim meadow still retains
The wintry torrent’s oozy stains,
Beneath a willow, long forsook,
The fisher seeks his 'custom’d nook;
And bursting through the crackling sedge,
That crowns the current’s cavern’d edge,
He startles from the bordering wood
The bashful wild-duck’s early brood.
O’er the broad downs, a novel race,
Frisk the lambs with faltering pace,
And with eager bleatings fill
The foss that skirts the beacon’d hill.
His free-born vigor, yet unbroke,
To lordly man’s usurping yoke,
The bounding colt forgets to play,
Basking beneath the noontide ray,
And stretch’d among the daisies pied,
Of a green dingle’s sloping side;
While far beneath, where Nature spreads
Her boundless length of level meads,
In loose luxuriance taught to stray,
A thousand tumbling rills inlay
With silver veins the vale, or pass
Redundant through the sparkling grass.
* * * * *
Thomas Warton, 1728–1790.