I
What joy you take in making hotness hotter,
In emphasizing dullness with your buzz,
Making monotony more monotonous!
When summer comes, and drouth hath dried the water
In all the creeks, we hear your ragged rasp
Filing the stillness. Or,—as urchins beat
A stagnant pond whereon the bubbles gasp,—
Your switch-like music whips the midday heat.
O burr of sound caught in the Summer’s hair,
We hear you everywhere.
II
We hear you in the vines and berry-brambles,
Along the unkempt lanes, among the weeds,
Amid the shadeless meadows, gray with seeds,
And by the wood, round which the rail-fence rambles,
Sawing the sunlight with your sultry saw.
Or,—like to tomboy truants, at their play
With noisy mirth among the barn’s deep straw,—
You sing away the careless summer-day.
O brier-like voice that clings in idleness
To Summer’s drowsy dress.
III
You tramp of insects, vagrant and unheeding,
Improvident, who of the summer make
One long green meal-time, and for winter take
No care, aye singing or just merely feeding!
Happy-go-lucky vagabond,—though frost
Shall pierce, ere long, your coat of green or brown,
And pinch your body,—let no song be lost,
But as you lived, into your grave go down—
Like some small poet with his little rhyme,
Forgotten of all time.
FOREST AND FIELD
I
Green, watery jets of light let through
The rippling foliage drenched with dew;
And golden glimmers, warm and dim,
That in the vistaed distance swim;
Where, round the wood-spring’s oozy urn,
The limp, loose fronds of forest fern
Trail like the tresses, green and wet,
A wood-nymph binds with violet.
O’er rocks that bulge and roots that knot
The emerald-amber mosses clot;
From matted walls of brier and brush
The elder nods its plumes of plush;
And, Argus-eyed with bloom on bloom,
The wild-rose breathes its wild perfume;
May-apples, ripening yellow, lean
With oblong fruit, a lemon-green,
Near Indian-turnips, long of stem,
That bear an acorn-oval gem,
As if some woodland Bacchus there,—
While braiding locks of hyacinth hair
With ivy-tod,—had idly tossed
His thyrsus down and so had lost:
And blood-root, that from scarlet wombs
Puts forth, in spring, its milk-white blooms,
That then like starry footsteps shine
Of April under beech and pine;
At which the gnarléd eyes of trees
Stare, big as Fauns’, at Dryadës,
That bend above a fountain’s spar,
As white and naked as a star.