And a wood-thrush deep in our laurel thicket rinsing clear the air around with her liquid notes....
Since Christmas I have seen it all, for it was Christmas when the boys came marching home, seen it again and again, never tiring of seeing it, life as it shuttles across the loom of the Middle Basin. If the canvas were a meadow backgrounded in green, this is how the picture would be: a patch of red-bud now and then for early spring; and later, a green sheen creeping like a high-tide over the hills. But later still, after the wheat is harvested it were a stubblefield canvassed to cleanness; there would run a riot of passion flowers and morning glories in brave, bold colors of beauty. And the picture would be June in the Middle Basin.
I have sat this afternoon watching the trees on the round breast of the hill across the way, a shield of green on the round shoulder of the hill; and as I looked I had a strange upliftingness which I knew was of poetry and that it was the melting of my heart because it was June again and home and because of the love of you.
Why should I potter and make excuse of it? If there be love there is a poem.
Take mine as it is—this voice of the trees—as the sweetness of it all came over me, listening, listening and loving you, Eloise.
WHAT SAY THE BEECHES?
What say the beeches, heart of my heart?
(Comrades we three!)
Wise in their canopied gallery of art—
Clear-visioned, true, in their cloisters apart
From the life which dwarfs when the soul is the mart
Of passions set free.
Write it, dear beeches—historian tree—
Write it for me.
My heart, it hath doubted; my soul, it hath slept.
Alone with the trees and the stars it hath wept,
Not knowing the mystery, not seeing the end—
Oh, be to it, beeches—calm beeches—its friend!
For part of the Infinite—you and the stars—
Sing it the Truth with your infinite bars.
The little leaves whisper'd, baby-voiced, low;
The finger-limbs wrote it 'mid starlighted glow:
"Love and believe, and be kind as you go!"
(O Heart, it is so!)
Why should you care for me to write of war and that last bloody fight, now that I am at home again, and my heart in the melting? Is it because it takes it all to make life, the melting, the June days, and the fight?
And why have I written all this, here, at The Home Stretch, months after it has happened, with you coming, even as I write it, down the old sweet path to me, in the old sweet way? Coming to see if I have finished my letter to you. And I wrote it because but yesterday you said, "Jack, dear, I want you to finish that letter you wrote me in the Philippines, the one you wrote to your love that was lost. Finish it, Jack, this one here at home for me, in our own home, ours, and for your love that was found!"
And so I have done it, sweetheart.
IV