Divining God from things
Humble as weeds and bees;
From songs the free bird sings
Learn all are vain but these;
In light-delighted springs,
Wise, star-familiar trees,
Seek love's philosophies.
5.
Here where the days are dimmest,
Each old, big-hearted tree
Gives bounteous sympathy;
Here where dead nights sit grimmest
In druid company;
Here where the days are dimmest.
Leaves of my lone communion,
Leaves; and the listening sigh
Of silence wanders by;
While on my soul the union
Is—of the wood and sky—
Leaves of my lone communion.
And eyes with tears are aching,
While life waits wistfully
For love that may not be:
In visions vain of waking
Lives all it can not see.—
And eyes with tears are aching,
And eyes with tears are aching.
6.
And here alone I sit and see it so.
A vale of willows swelling into knobs,
A bulwark eastward. Sloping low
Westward the scooping waters flow
Under a rocky culvert's arch that throbs
With clanging wheels of transient trains that go
Screaming to north and south.
Here all the weary waters, stagnant stayed,
Sleep at the culvert's mouth;
The current's hungry hiccup still afraid,
Haply, that I should never know
The secret 'neath the striate scum o' the stream
The devil and the dream,
I, dropping gravels so the echo sob
Mocking and thin as music of a shade
In shades that wring from rocks a hollow woe,
Complaining phantoms of faint whispers rob.
There, up the valley where the lank grass leaps
Blades each a crooked kris,
The currents strike or miss
Dream melodies: No wide-belled mallow sleeps
Monandrous flowers oval as a kiss;
No mandrake curling convolutions up
Loops heavy blossoms, each a conical cup
That swoons moon-nectar and a serpent's hiss;
No tiger-lily, where the crayfish play,
Mirrors a savage face, a copper hue
Streaked with a crimson dew;
No dragon-fly in endless error keeps
Sewing the pale-gold gown of day
With tangled stitches of a burning blue,—
Whose brilliant body but a needle is,
An azurn and incarnate ray:—
But here, where haunted with the shade,
The dull stream stales and dies,
Are beauties none or few,
Such sinister and new;
And one at widest noon-gaze shrinks afraid
Beneath the timid skies;
So, if you ask me why I answer this:—
You know not; only where the kildees wade
There in the foamy scum,
There where the wet rocks ail,—
Low rocks to which the water-reptiles come,
Basking pied bodies in the brindled shade,—
Dim as a bubble's prism on the grail
Below, an angled sparkle rayed,
While lights and shadows aid
From breeze-blown clouds that lounge at sunny loss,
Deep down, a sense of wavy features quail
The heart; with lips that writhe and fade
And clench; tough, rooty limbs that twist and cross,
And flabby hair of smoky moss.
A brimstone sunset. And at night
The twinkling flies in will-o'-the-wisp dance wheel
Through copse and open, all a gnomish green.
I hear the water, and the wave is white
There where the boulder plants a keel,
And each taunt ripple 's sheen.—
Where instant insects dot
The dark with spurts of sulphur—bright,
Beneath the hazy height,
No bitter-almond trees make wan the night,
Building bloom ridges of a ghostly lustre,
But white-tops tossing cluster over cluster:
Huge-seen within that twilight spot—
As if a hill-born giant, half asleep,
Had dropped his night-cap while he drove his sheep
Foldward through fallow browns
And foxy grays,—a something crowns
The knoll—is it the odorous peak
Of one June-savory timothy stack?