I do not remember to have met the "shagbark" in poetry before, or that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by
"The wide-ranked mowers wading to
the knee,"
as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cutting, though they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass; perhaps this is the explanation of the line.
But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young begins to weigh upon him:—
"Meanwhile that devil-may-care,
the bobolink,
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver
stops
Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's
tremulous brink,
And 'twixt the winrows most
demurely drops."
I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.
Another carefully studied description of Lowell's is this:—
"The robin sings as of old from the
limb!
The catbird croons in the lilac-bush!
Through the dim arbor, himself more
dun,
Silently hops the hermit thrush."
Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is the most pleasing of these poems:—
"Dear common flower, that grow'st
beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless
gold,
First pledge of blithesome May."