APRIL
How much are you achieving
O April day,
By orchard looms a-weaving
All apple-gay?
Tie on your cherry blossom, clothe your squills
Madonna-blue, and give your daffodils
Their collars of pale straw, and come away,
Your rain-awoken hills
Shall welcome May.
What is behind your weeping
O April tears?
Your lilac plumes are sweeping,
Your silken spears
Of chestnut bristle in the changing sky
Whilst herded clouds foregather, ’neath the high
Storm-loud arena’s thundering charioteers:
And beckoned silently
The swallow nears.
MAY-JUNE
Now is the swaddling husk of Winter shed,
And waking Summer, robed in windy showers,
Is heralded from silvered aspen towers
And orchards in high blossom garlanded.
Now sunlight, in the plumed laburnum flowers
And purple lilac, trembles overhead;
And bees a-drone in field and flower bed
Make clamorous the trade of teeming hours.
Now the sweet-pea, all honey-laden, shows
Full-swollen sails, her mooring ropes of green
Encircle twigs. And soon the primrose queen
Lights her pale lamps of Evening ’mid the glows
Of brazen flower-suns, that burn between
The yawning honeysuckle and the rose.
THE STROLLING SINGER
Sun-bathed in Summer peace the village lay
That afternoon. Along the happy street
Milk-fragrant kine, and wagons high with hay
Came lumbering. The fields were loud with bees
And drowsy with the wind-stirred meadowsweet.
From bowing trees
Fell chatter, and above the garden wall
Wide sunflowers beamed at spearing hollyhocks
That dared the wind, and scorned the clustered stocks,
And bore their laddered blooms high over all.