The hornets build in plaster dropping rooms,
And on its mossy porch the lizard lies;
Around its chimneys slow the swallow flies,
And on its roof the locusts snow their blooms.
Like some sad thought that broods here, old perfumes
Haunt its dim stairs; the cautious zephyr tries
Each gusty door, like some dead hand, then sighs
With ghostly lips among the attic glooms.
And now a heron, now a kingfisher,
Flits in the willows where the riffle seems
At each faint fall to hesitate to leap,
Fluttering the silence with a little stir.
Here Summer seems a placid face asleep,
And the near world a figment of her dreams.
OMENS
Sad on the hills the poppied sunset died.
Slow as a fungus breaking through the crusts
Of forest leaves, the waning half-moon thrusts
Through gray-brown clouds one milky silver side;
In her vague light the dogwoods, dim-descried,
Seem dying torches flourished by the gusts;
The apple-orchards seem the restless dusts
Of wind-thinned mists upon the hills they hide.
It is a night of omens whom late May
Meets, like a wraith, among her train of hours;
An apparition with appealing eye
And hesitant foot, that walks a willowed way,
And, speaking through the fading moon and flowers,
Bids her prepare her gentle soul to die.
IMPERFECTION
Not as the eye hath seen shall we behold
Romance and beauty when we’ve passed away;
That robed the dull facts of the intimate day
In life’s wild raiment of unusual gold:
Not as the ear hath heard shall we be told,
Hereafter, myth and legend once that lay
Warm at the heart of Nature, clothing clay
In attributes of no material mold.
These were imperfect of necessity,
That wrought through imperfection for far ends
Of perfectness—as calm philosophy,
Teaching a child, from his high heaven descends
To earth’s familiar things; informingly
Vesting his thoughts in that it comprehends.
ARCANA
Earth hath her images of utterance,
Her hieroglyphic meanings which elude;
A symbol language of similitude,
Into whose secrets science may not glance;
In which the Mind-in-Nature doth romance
In miracles that baffle if pursued—
No guess shall search them and no thought intrude
Beyond the limits of her sufferance.
So doth the great Intelligence above
Hide His own thought’s creations; and attire
Forms in the dream’s ideal, which He dowers
With immaterial loveliness and love—
As essences of fragrance and of fire—
Preaching th’ evangels of the stars and flowers.