V
The tumult and the booming of the trees,
Shaken with shoutings of the winds of March—
No mightier music have I heard than these,—
The rocking and the rushing of the trees,
The organ-thunder of the forest’s arch.
And in the wind their columned trunks become,
Each one, a mighty pendulum,
Swayed to and fro as if in time
To some vast song, some roaring rhyme,
Wind-shouted from sonorous hill to hill.
The woods are never still:
The dead leaves frenzy by,
Innumerable and frantic as the dance
That whirled its madness once beneath the sky
In ancient Greece,—like withered Corybants:
And I am caught and carried with their rush,
Their countless panic—borne away,
A brother to the wind, through the deep gray
Of the old beech-wood, where the wild March-day
Sits dreaming, filling all the boisterous hush
With murmurous laughter and swift smiles of sun;
Conspiring in its heart and plotting how
To load with leaves and blossoms every bough,
And whispering to itself, “Now Spring’s begun!
And soon her flowers shall golden through these leaves!—
Away, ye sightless things and sere!
Make room for that which shall appear!
The glory and the gladness of the year;
The loveliness my eye alone perceives,—
Still hidden there beneath the covering leaves,—
My song shall waken!—flowers, that this floor
Of whispering woodland soon shall carpet o’er
For my sweet sisters’ feet to tread upon,
Months kinder than myself, the stern and strong,
Tempestuous-loving one,
Whose soul is full of wild, tumultuous song,
And whose rough hand now thrusts itself among
The dead leaves; groping for the flowers that lie
Huddled beneath, each like a sleep-closed eye:
Gold adder’s-tongue and pink
Oxalis; snow-pale bloodroot blooms;
May-apple hoods, that parasol the brink,
Screening their moons, of the slim woodland-stream:
And the wild iris; trillium,—white as stars,—
And bluebells, dream on dream:
With harsh hand groping in the glooms,
I grasp their slenderness and shake
Their lovely eyes awake,
Dispelling from their souls the sleep that mars;
With heart-disturbing jars
Clasping their forms, and with rude finger-tips,
Through the dark rain that drips
Lifting them shrinking to my stormy lips.
VI
“Already spicewood and the sassafras,
Like fragrant flames, begin
To tuft their boughs with topaz, ere they spin
Their beryl canopies—a glimmering mass,
Mist-blurred, above the deepening grass.
Already where the old beech stands
Clutching the lean soil as it were with hands
Taloned and twisted,—on its trunk a knot,
A huge excrescence, a great fungous clot,
Like some enormous and distorting wart,—
My eyes can see how, blot on beautiful blot
Of blue, the violets blur through
The musky and the loamy rot
Of leaf-pierced leaves; and, heaven in their hue,
A sunbeam at each blossom’s heart,
The little bluets, crew on azure crew,
Prepare their myriads for invasion too.
VII
“And in my soul I see how, soon, shall rise,—
Still hidden to men’s eyes,—
Dim as the wind that round them treads,—
Hosts of spring-beauties, streaked with rosy reds,
And pale anemones, whose airy heads,
As to some fairy rhyme,
All day shall nod in delicate time:
And now, even now, white peal on peal
Of pearly bells,—that in bare boughs conceal
Themselves,—like snowy music, chime on chime,
The huckleberries to my gaze reveal—
Clusters, that soon shall toss
Above this green-starred moss,
That, like an emerald fire, gleams across
This forest-side, and from its moist deeps lifts
Slim, wire-like stems of seed;
Or, lichen-colored, glows with many a bead
Of cup-like blossoms: carpets where, I read,
When through the night’s dark rifts
The moonlight’s glimpsing splendor sifts,
The immaterial forms
With moonbeam-beckoning arms,
Of Fable and Romance,—
Myths that are born of whispers of the wind
And foam of falling waters, music-twinned—
Shall lead the legendary dance;
The dance that never stops,
Of Earth’s wild beauty on the green hill-tops.”
VIII
The youth, the beauty and disdain
Of birth, death does not know,
Compel my heart with longing like to pain
When the spring breezes blow.
The fragrance and the heat
Of their soft breath, whose musk makes sweet
Each woodland way, each wild retreat,
Seem saying in my ear, “Hark, and behold!
Before a week be gone
This barren woodside and this leafless wold
A million flowers shall invade
With argent and azure, pearl and gold,—
Like rainbow fragments scattered of the dawn,—
Here making bright, here wan
Each foot of earth, each glen and glimmering glade,
Each rood of windy wood,
Where late gaunt Winter stood,
Shaggy with snow and howling at the sky;
Where even now the Springtime seems afraid
To whisper of the beauty she designs,
The flowery campaign that she now outlines
Within her soul; her heart’s conspiracy
To take the world with loveliness; defy
And then o’erwhelm the Death—that Winter throned
Amid the trees,—with love that she hath owned
Since God informed her from His very breath,
Giving her right triumphant over Death.
And, irresistible,
Her heart’s deep ecstasy shall swell,
Taking the form of flower, leaf, and blade,
Invading every dell,
And sweeping, surge on surge,
Around the world, like some exultant raid,
Even to the heaven’s verge.
Soon shall her legions storm
Death’s ramparts, planting Life’s fair standard there,
The banner which her beauty hath in care,
Beauty, that shall eventuate
With all the pomp and pageant and the state,
That are a part of power, and that wait
On majesty, to which it, too, is heir.”
IX
Already bluish pink and green
The bloodroot’s buds and leaves are seen
Clumped in dim cirques; one from the other
Hardly distinguished in the shadowy smother
Of last year’s leaves blown brown between.
And, piercing through the layers of dead leaves,
The searching eye perceives
The dog’s-tooth violet, pointed needle-keen,
Lifting its beak of mottled green;
While near it heaves
The May-apple its umbrous spike, a ball,—
Like to a round, green bean,
That folds its blossom,—topping its tight-closed parasol:
The clustered bluebell near
Hollows its azure ear,
Low-leaning to the earth as if to hear
The sound of its own growing and perfume
Flowing into its bloom:
And softly there
The twin-leaf’s stems prepare
Pale tapers of transparent white,
As if to light
The Spirit of Beauty through the wood’s green night.