The world was turning into light,
Was sweeping into life and peace,
And folded in the fading night,
I felt the dawning sink and cease.
SEPTEMBER
The morns are grey with haze and faintly cold,
The early sunsets arc the west with red;
The stars are misty silver overhead,
Above the dawn Orion lies outrolled.
Now all the slopes are slowly growing gold,
And in the dales a deeper silence dwells;
The crickets mourn with funeral flutes and bells,
For days before the summer had grown old.
Now the night-gloom with hurrying wings is stirred,
Strangely the comrade pipings rise and sink,
The birds are following in the pathless dark
The footsteps of the pilgrim summer. Hark!
Was that the redstart or the bobolink?
That lonely cry the summer-hearted bird?
BY THE WILLOW SPRING
TO E. W.
Come hither, Care, and look on this fair place,
But leave your gossip and your puckered face
Beyond that flowering carrot in the glow,
Where the red poppies in the orchard blow,
And come with gentle feet; the last thing there
Was a white butterfly upon the air,
And even now a thrush was in the grass,
To feel the sovereign water slowly pass.
This pool is quiet as oblivion,
Hidden securely from the flooding sun;
Its crystal placid surface here receives
The wan grey under light of the willow leaves;
And shy things brood about the grass unheard;
Only in sunny distance sings the bird.
O Time long dead, O days reclaimed and done,
Thou broughtest joy and tears to every one,
And here by this deep pool thou wast not slow,
To deal a maiden all her tender woe;
Be kindlier to her now that she is dead,
Let her charmed spirit visit this well-head
More often, for at eve in honey-time,
Drifting in silence from her ghostly clime,
She haunts the pool about the willows pale:
Be gentle, for my feeling art may fail,
I’ll freshen sorrow and retell her tale.
She was a fragile daughter of the earth,
And touched with faery from her fatal birth;
For many summers she was hardly shy,
Not clouded with her hovering destiny,
But only wild as any woodland thing,
That comes at even to a trodden spring;
And scarce she seemed of any settled mood,
That lights the peaceful hills of maidenhood,
But shifted strangely on the whimsy air,
Not quiet nor contented anywhere.
She gathered sunshine in an earthen cruse,
And thought to keep it for her own sweet use;
Or fluttered flowers from her window high,
And wept upon them when they would not fly;
And when she found the brownish mignonette
Had blossomed where a little seed was set,
She planted her rag playmate in the sun,
Because she wanted yet another one;
And when she heard the enraptured sparrow sing,
She clamoured for a song from everything.
For many years she was as strange and free,
As a pine linnet in a cedar tree.
Her folk thought: She is very wild and odd,
But she is good, we’ll wait and trust in God.
O love, that watched the weird and charméd child,
Change from her airy fancies sweet and mild,
Like a blue brook that clears a meadow spring,
And threads the barley where the bobolinks sing,
Then wimples by the roots of dusky firs,
And gathers darkness in those deeps of hers,
Then makes an arrowy movement through a pass,
Where rocks are crannied with the clinging grass,
Then falls, almost dissolved in silver rain,
She gathers deeply to a pool again;
But something wild in her new spirit lies,
She never can regain her limpid eyes:
O love, alas! ’twas ever so to be,
When streams set out to reach the bitter sea.
It was a time within the early spring,
Before the orchards had done blossoming,
Before the kinglet on his northern search,
Had ceased his timorous piping in the birch,
When streams were bright before the coming leaves
And gurgled like the swallows in the eaves,
She wandered led by fancy to this place,
And looked upon the water’s crystal face;
She saw—what thing of beauty or of awe
I know not, no one knoweth what she saw.
But ever after she was constant here,
As silent as her shadow in the mere,
Sitting upon a stone which many feet
Had grooved and trodden for the water sweet,
And leaning gravely on her slanted arm,
Her fingers buried in the gravel warm,
She gazed and gazed and did not speak or sigh,
As if this gazing was her destiny.
They led her nightly from the magic pool,
Before the shadows grew too deep and cool;
They thought to win her from the liquid spell,
And tried to tease the elfin maid to tell,
What was the charm that led her to the spring;
But all their words availed not anything.
Then gazed they on the surface of the pool
To read the reason of such subtle rule;
Their eyes were overclouded, they could see
(Who had drawn water there perpetually)
Nothing but water in a depth serene,
With a few moony stones of palish green.
They thought perchance it was her face she saw
And answered, beauty unto beauty’s law,
But when they showed her image in a glass,
She was not cured and nothing came to pass;
So then they left her to her own strange will,
And here she stayed when the fair pool was still.
But when the wind would hurl the heavy rain,
She peered out sadly from her window-pane;
And when the night set wildly close and deep,
She took her trouble down the dale of sleep:
But when the night was warm and no dew fell,
She waked and dreamed beside the starlit well.
Then came a change, each day some offering
She laid beside the clear soft flowing spring;
And there she found them at the break of morn,
And everything would take away forlorn;
Until beside the unconscious spring was laid
Each treasure held most precious by a maid.
After, she offered flowers and often set
A bowlful of the pleasant mignonette,
And starred the stones with the narcissus white,
And pansies left athinking all the night,
Then ruffled dewy dahlias, and at last,
When sundown told the summer-time had passed,
The stainéd asters; but from day to day,
Sadly she took the untouched flowers away.
With autumn and the sounding harvest flute,
She brought her timid god the heavy fruit;
But found it still and cool at early dawn,
Beaded with dew upon the crispy lawn.
At last one eve she placed an apple here,
Smooth as a topaz and as golden clear,
Scented like almonds, with a flesh like dew
And luscious-sweet as honey through and through.
She left it sadly on the sleepy lawn,
But when she came again her apple gold was gone.