THE BIRCH-TREE.
Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine,
Among thy leaves that palpitate forever;
Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned,
The soul once of some tremulous, inland river,
Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever!
While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine,
Holds up its leaves in happy, happy silence;
Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended—
I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands,
And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.
Upon the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet,
Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad,
Dripping about thy slim white stem, whose shadow
Slopes quivering down the water’s dusky quiet,
Thou shrink’st, as on her bath’s edge would some strolled Dryad.
Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers;
Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping;
Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience,
And the lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping
Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.
Thou art to me like my beloved maiden,
So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences;
Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets
Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o’er my senses,
And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.
Whether my heart with hope or sorrow tremble,
Thou sympathized still; wild and unquiet,
I fling me down; thy ripple, like a river,
Flows valley-ward, where calmness is, and by it
My heart is floated down into the land of quiet.
J. R. Lowell.