Two locust-blooms her hands; and slips
Of eglantine her cheeks and lips;
Her hair, a hyacinth of gloom:
The balmy buds give no perfume
When Gwendolyn draws near to me,
The gate beyond the portico;
For all aroma sweet is she,
All fragrance that I know.
Life, love, and faith are in her face,
And in her presence all their grace:
And my religion is a word,
A wish of hers. No mocking-bird,
When Gwendolyn laughs near, dare float
One bubble from the portico;
For all of song is in her throat,
All music that I know.
IV
“The mocking-bird! and then weird fancy filled
My soul with vision, and I saw a song
Pursue a bird that was no bird—a voice
Concealed in dim expressions of the spring,—
Who sits among the forests and the fields,
With dark-blue eyes smiling to life the flowers,—
Where we strolled happy as the April hills:
A sunbeam, all the day that fell
Upon the fountain,—
Like laughter gurgling in the dell
Below the mountain,—
Drank, with its sparkle, one by one,
The water-words that, in the sun,
Made melody,—the sun-rays tell,—
That never yet was done.
A moon-ray, that had gone astray
’Mid wildwood alleys,
Where Echo haunts the forest way
Among the valleys,
The livelong night upon the rocks
Slept, hid among girl Echo’s locks,
And stole her voice,—the moonbeams say,—
That mocks and only mocks.
A shadow, that had made its seat
Amid the roses
And thorns—the bitter and the sweet
That life discloses—
Mixed with the rose-balm and the dew
And crimson thorns that pierced it through,
Until its soul,—the shades repeat,—
Was portion of them, too.
A Fairy found the beam of gold,
And ray of glitter;
The shadow, whose dim soul did hold
Both sweet and bitter;
And made a bird, that haunts the morn
And night; that flits from flower to thorn,
A voice of laughter,—it is told,—
Love, mockery, and scorn.
V
“Among the white haw-blossoms, where the creek
Droned under drifts of dogwood and of haw,
The red-bird, like a crimson blossom blown
Against the snow-white bosom of the Spring,
The chaste confusion of her lawny breast,
Sang on, prophetic of serener days,
As confident as June’s completer hours.
And I stood listening like a hind, who hears
A wood-nymph breathing in a forest flute
Among gray beech-trees of myth-haunted ways:
And when it ceased, the memory of the air
Blew like a syrinx in my brain: I made
A lyric of the notes that men might know: