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Why does Nature love the number five?
Five-whorled leaves and five-tipped flowers?—
Haply the bee i’ the voluble rose,
Laboring aye to store its hive,
And humming away the long noon hours,
Haply it knows as it comes and goes:
Or haply the butterfly,
Or moth of pansy-dye,
Flitting from bloom to bloom
In the forest’s violet gloom,
It knows why:
Or the irised fly, to whom
Each bud, as it glitters near,
Lends eager and ardent ear.—
And, also, tell
Why Nature loves so well
To prank her flowers in gold and blue.
Haply the dew,
That lies so close to them the whole night through,
Hugged to each honeyed heart,
Perhaps the dew the secret could impart:
Or haply now the bluebird there that bears,
Glad, unawares,
God’s sapphire on its wings,
The lapis-lazuli
O’ the clean, clear sky,
The heav’n of which he sings,
Haply he, too, could tell me why:
Or the maple there that swings,
To the wind’s soft sigh,
Its winglets, crystal red,
A rainy ruby twinkling overhead:
Or haply now the wind, that breathes of rain
Amid the rosy boughs, it could explain:
And even now, in words of mystery,—
That haunt the heart of me,—
Low-whispered, dim and bland,
Tells me, but tells in vain,
And strives to make me see and understand,
Delaying where
The feldspar fire of the violet breaks,
And the starred myrtle aches
With heavenly blue; and the frail windflower shakes
Its trembling tresses in the opal air.
IN SOLITARY PLACES
I
The hurl and hurry of the winds of March,
That tore the ash and bowed the pine and larch,
And filled the night with rushings,—like the crew
Of the Wild Huntsman,—and the days with hue
And cry of storm, soft in the heaven’s porch
Have laid them down:—loud winds, that trampled through
The forests with enormous, scythe-like sweep,
And from the darkened deep,
The battlemented heavens, thunder-blue,
Rumbled the arch,
The rocking arch of all the booming oaks,
With stormy chariot-spokes:
Chariots, from which wild bugle-blasts they blew
In warlike challenge.... Now the windflower sweet
Misses the fury of their ruining feet,
The trumpet-thunder of resistless flight,
Crashing and vast, obliterating light;
Sweeping the skeleton madness down
Of last-year’s leaves; and, overhead,
Hurrying the giant foliage of night,
Gaunt clouds that streamed with tempest.
... Now each crown
Of ancient woods, that clamored with their tread,
The frenzy of their passage, stoops no more,
Hearing no more their clarion-command,
Their chariot-hurl and the wild whip in hand.
No more, no more,
The forests rock and roar
And tumult with their shoutings.
Hushed and still
Is the green-gleaming and the sunlit hill,
Along whose sides,
Flushing the dewy moss and rainy grass—
Beneath the topaz-tinted sassafras,
Pale, aromatic as some orient wine—
The violet fire of the bluet glides,
The amaranthine flame
Of sorrel and of bluebell runs;
And through the drabs and duns
Of rotting leaves, the moonéd celandine,
Line upon lovely line,
Deliberate, goldens into birth:
And, ruby and rose, the moccasin-flower hides:
Innumerable flowers, with which she writes her name,
April, upon the page,
The winter-withered parchment of old earth;
Her fragrant autograph, that gives it worth
And loveliness that take away its age.
II
Here where the woods are wet,
The blossoms of the dog’s-tooth violet
Seem meteors in a miniature firmament
Of wild-flowers, where, with rainy sound and scent
Of breeze and blossom, dim the April went:
Their tongue-like leaves of umber-mottled green,
So thickly seen,
Seem dropping words of gold,
Inaudible syllables of a magic old.
Beside them, near the wahoo-bush and haw,
Blooms the hepatica;
Its slender flowers upon swaying stems
Lifting chaste, solitary blooms,
Astral, and twilight-colored,—frail as gems
That star the diadems
Of elves and sylvans, piercing pale the glooms;—
Or like the wands, the torches of the fays,
That link lone, leafy ways
With slim, uncertain rays:—
(The faëry people, whom no eye may see,
Busy, so legend says,
With budding bough and leafing tree,
The blossom’s heart o’ honey and honey-sack o’ the bee,
And all dim thoughts and dreams,
That take the form of flowers, as it seems,
And haunt the banks of greenwood streams,
Showing in every line and curve,
Commensurate with our love, an intimacy,
A smiling confidence or sweet reserve.)
There, at that leafy turn,
Of trailered rocks, rise fronds of hart’s-tongue fern:
Fronds that my fancy names
Uncurling gleeds of emerald and gold,
Whose feathering flames
Were kindled in the musky mould,
And now, as stealthy as the graying morn,
Thorn upon woolly thorn,
Build up, and silently unfold
Faint, cool, green fires, that burn
Uneagerly, and spread around
An elfin light above the ground,
Like that green, rayless glow
A spirit, lamped with crystal, makes below
In dripping caves of labyrinthine moss,
Or grottoes of the weedy undertow.—
And in the underwoods, around them, toss
The white-hearts with their penciled leaves,
That, ’mid the shifting gleams and glooms,
The interchanging shine and shade,
Seem some soft garment made
By visionary hands, that none perceives;
Hands busy with invisible looms
Of woodland shine and shade; a shadowy light,
Whose figments interbraid,
Carpeting the woods with colors and perfumes.—
Or, are they fragments left in flight,
These flow’rs that scatter every glade
With windy, rippling white,
And breezy, fluttering blue,
Of her wild gown that shone upon my sight,
A moment, in the woods I wandered through?
April’s, who fled this way?
April, whom still I follow,
Whom still my dreams pursue;
Who leads me on by many a tangled clue
Of loveliness, until in some green hollow,
Born of her fragrance and her melody,
But lovelier than herself and happier, too,
Cradled in blossoms of the dogwood-tree,
My soul shall see,
White as a sunbeam in the heart of day,
The infant, May.
III
Up, up, my heart! and forth where none perceives!
’Twas this which that sweet lay meant
You heard in dreams. Come, let us take rich payment,
For every care that grieves,
From Nature’s prodigal purse. ’Twas this that May meant
By sending forth the wind which round our eaves
Whispered all night;—or was’t the spirit who weaves,
From gold and glaucous green of early leaves,
Spring’s regal raiment?—
Up, up, my heart, and forth where none perceives!