By Fields of Grass
BY fields of grass and woodland silences
The city’s tumult is encamped around;
The jingling, clanging, shrieking fiends of sound
Expire within the wide world-circling breeze.
The soul amid a multitude of trees,
Or grass enveloped on the fragrant ground,
Is lifted to its utmost starry round,
And listens to celestial harmonies.
From this unspeakably divine rebirth,
Its sordid life returning shows through rifts
How purely spreads the sky, how musical
The streams and breezes flow across the earth,
How light the tree its fruity load uplifts,
How easily the weed is beautiful.
October
AGAINST the winter’s heav’n of white the blood
Of earth runs very quick and hot to-day;
A storm of fiery leaves are out at play
Around the lingering sunset of the wood.
Where rows of blackberries unnoticed stood,
Run streams of ruddy color wildly gay;
The golden lane half dreaming picks its way
Through ’whelming vines, as through a gleaming flood.
O warm, outspoken earth, a little space
Against thy beating heart my heart shall beat,
A little while they twain shall bleed and burn,
And then the cold touch and the gray, gray face,
The frozen pulse, the drifted winding-sheet,
And speechlessness, and the chill burial urn.