JUNIPER COVE TWENTY YEARS AFTER
The bay gleams softly in the sun,
The morning widens o’er the world:
The bluebird’s song is just begun,
And down the skies white clouds are furled.
The boat lies idly by the shore,
The shed I built with happy care
Is fallen; and I see no more
The white tents in the eager air.
The goldenrod holds up its plumes
In the long stretch of meadow grass,
The briarrose shakes its sweet perfumes,
In coverts where the sparrows pass.
Far off, above, the sapphire gleams,
Far off, below, the sapphire flows,
And this, my place of morning dreams,
The bank where my vain visions rose!
Sweet Alice, he came back again,
Across the waste of summer sea,
What time the fields were full of grain,
But not to thee; but not to thee.
She comes no more when evening falls,
To watch the stars wheel up the sky;
Then love and light were over all;
Alas! that light and love should die.
I feel her hand upon my arm,
I see her eyes shine through the mist;
Her life was passionate and warm
As the red jewels at her wrist.
Hearts do not break, the world has said,
Though love lie stark and light be flown;
But still it counts its lost and dead,
And in the solitudes makes moan.
We school our lips to make our hearts
Seem other than in truth they are;
Before the lights we play our part,
And paint the flesh to hide the scar.
Masquers and mummers all, and yet
The slaves of some dead passion’s fires,
Of hopes the soul can ne’er forget
Still sobbing in life’s trembling wires.
Fate puts our dear desires in pawn,
Youth passes, unredeemed they lie;
The leaves drop from our rose of dawn,
And storms fall from the mocking sky.
I shall come back no more; my ship
Waits for me by the sundering sea;
A prayer for her is on my lip—
And the old life is dead to me.
LISTENING
I have lain beneath the pine trees just to hear the thrush’s calling,
I have waited for the throstle where the harvest fields were brown,
I have caught the lark’s sweet trilling from the depths of cloud-land
falling
And the piping of the linnet through the willow branches blown.
But you have some singing graces, you who sing because you love it, That are higher than the throstle, or the linnet, or the lark; And, however far my soul may reach, your song is far above it; And I falter while I follow as a child does in the dark.
In elder days, when all the world was silent save the beating Of the tempest-gathered ocean ‘gainst the grey volcanic walls, When the light had met the darkness and the mountains sent their greeting To each other in sharp flashes as the vivid lightning falls,
Then the high gods said, “In token that we love the earth we fashioned, We will set the white stars singing, and teach man the art of song”: And there rose up from the valleys sounds of love and life impassioned, Till men cried, with arms uplifted, “Now from henceforth we are strong!”
Adown the ages there have come the sounds of that first singing, Lifting up the weary-hearted in the fever of the time; And I, who wait and wander far, felt all my soul upspringing, To but touch those ancient forces and the energies sublime,