A VAGABOND MIND
Since early this morning the world has seemed surging
With unworded rhythm, and rhyme without thought.
It may be the Muses take this way of urging
The patience and pains by which poems are wrought.
It may be some singer who passed into glory,
With songs all unfinished, is lingering near
And trying to tell me the rest of the story,
Which I am too dull of perception to hear.
I hear not, I see not; but feel the sweet swinging
And swaying of metre, in sunlight and shade,
The still arch of Space with such music is ringing
As never an audible orchestra made.
The moments glide by me, and each one is dancing;
Aquiver with life is each leaf on the tree,
And out on the ocean is movement entrancing,
As billow with billow goes racing with glee.
With never a thought that is worthy the saying,
And never a theme to be put into song,
Since early this morning my mind has been straying,
A vagabond thing, with a vagabond throng,
With gay, idle moments, and waves of the ocean,
With winds and with sunbeams, and tree-tops and birds,
It has lilted along in the joy of mere motion,
To songs without music and verse without words.
MY FLOWER ROOM
My Flower Room is such a little place,
Scarce twenty feet by nine; yet in that space
I have met God; yea, many a radiant hour
Have talked with Him, the All-Embracing-Cause,
About His laws.
And He has shown me, in each vine and flower
Such miracles of power
That day by day this Flower Room of mine
Has come to be a shrine.
Fed by the self-same soil and atmosphere
Pale, tender shoots appear
Rising to greet the light in that sweet room.
One speeds to crimson bloom;
One slowly creeps to unassuming grace;
One climbs, one trails;
One drinks the light and moisture;
One exhales.
Up through the earth together, stem by stem
Two plants push swiftly in a floral race;
Till one sends forth a blossom like a gem;
And one gives only fragrance
In a seed
So small it scarce is felt within the hand.
Lie hidden such delights
Of scents and sights,
When by the elements of Nature freed,
As Paradise must have at its command.
From shapeless roots and ugly bulbous things
What gorgeous beauty springs!
Such infinite variety appears
A hundred artists in a hundred years
Could never copy from the floral world
The marvels that in leaf and bud lie curled.
Nor could the most colossal mind of man
Create one little seed of plant or vine
Without assistance from the First Great Plan;
Without the aid divine.
Who but a God
Could draw from light and moisture, heat and cold,
And fashion in earth’s mould,
A multitude of blooms to deck one sod?
Who but a God!
Not one man knows
Just why the bloom and fragrance of the rose
Or how its tints were blent;
Or why the white Camelia without scent
Up through the same soil grows;
Or how the daisy and the violet
And blades of grass first on wild meadows met.
Not one, not one man knows;
The wisest but SUPPOSE.