25
The summer streets are filled with flickering swarms,
The village band is playing and the wheels
Of farmer wagons clatter past the farms....
Bright headlights of black bulking automobiles
Flit back of Monomoy, where Indians, now
Pressing the clover with accustomed heels,
Would find great modern monsters on their track
Beside their wigwam or beyond their shack.
26
But as the music filters through the town,
And honey-suckle breathes around the doors,
One finds the lane as secret as the shores;
No modern engine treads its sweetness down,
No smart prospector makes this isle his own,
For pattern of the cheap and opportune—
Not ’neath this honey-suckle and this moon!
27
Back of the town where all the houses turn
Their mild grey fronts to winds that buffet strong,
The cobbled streets in patterns quaint and stern,
Lead to four trees spread on the sky like song;
Looking at these I paused the other day,
Wondering that beauty so bestript, forlorn,
Should strike a chord that takes processional way,
Crashed on the skies in branches gaunt and worn.
28
Twisted and starved these bitter trees that blow
Upon the Western sky like choral song,
Flinging strange rapture on the after glow;
Still radiant? Do these dead trees belong
To some tree-part of us, where bent and maimed
Green branches wither? Hampered twigs grow wrong ...?
Hush! On the screen of the bright Western sky
The crippled trees again burst into song.
29
Modest these little houses of the town,
Staring with sober windows over the lea,
Scattered are peaks and gables toward the down,
Trailing slow march from seaport to the sea.
Charmed thing to hear one’s foot-fall sound along
Some moonlit, bricked, hedged street, whose panneled doors
Gleam with bright knockers, where the oblivioned stone
Was trodden once by Quaker ancestors.