EAVEN, the Spring’s coming true again!
Easterly over the sky’s spring-blue again
Passes a pearly flight of cloud—
Somewhere a dovecote is empty, surely!
And all of its birds have flown in a brood
Over the pure blue purely!
Westerly owl-grey gatherings
Linger a little yet:
Soon, owls! soon you will shrink
Out of the sun, I think,
Who even now turns silver-wet
The last of your ghostly gatherings.
Back to your windy barns again,
To your forsaken granaries,
Haunting, hating breed of the Winter!
For the grass in the mould begins to teem,
By every gate where the cuckoo flies
Primrose and fragile wind-flower enter,
And, lovelier truth than any dream,
Blue light is mirrored in ancient tarns again!
THE WORLD’S AMAZING BEAUTY.
HE world’s amazing beauty would make us cry
Aloud; but something in it strikes us dumb.
Beech-forests drenched in sunny floods
Where shaking rays and shadows hum,
The unrepeated aspects of the sky,
Clouds in their lightest and their wildest moods,
Bare shapes of hills, June grass in flower,
The sea in every hour,
Slopes that one January morning flow
Unbrokenly with snow,
Peaks piercing heaven with motions sharp and harsh,
Slow-moving flats, grey reed and silver marsh,
A flock of swans in flight
Or solitary heron flapping home,
Orchards of pear and cherry turning white,
Low apple-trees with rosy-budded boughs,
Streams where young willows drink and cows,
Earth’s rich ploughed loam
Thinking darkly forward to her sheaves,
Water in Autumn spotted with yellow leaves,
Light running overland,
Gulls standing still above their images
On strips of shining sand
While evening in a haze of green
Half-hides
The calm receding tides—
What in the beauty we have seen in these
Keeps us still silent? something we have not seen?
THE WHITE BLACKBIRDS.
MONG the stripped and sooty twigs of the wild cherry tree