Summer, with drowsy eyes and hair,
Who walks the orchard aisles between;
Whose hot touch tans the freckled pear,
And crimsons peach and nectarine;
And, in the vineyard everywhere,
Bubbles with blue the grape’s ripe green.
Where now the briers blossoming are,
Soon will the berries darkly glow;
Then Summer pass: and star on star,
Where now the grass is strewn below
With petals, soon, both near and far,
Will lie the obliterating snow.
VIII
But now the bluets blooming,
The bluets brightly blue,
O’er which the bees go booming,
Drunk with the honey-dew,
From wood-ways which they strew,
Make eyes of love at you....
O slender Quaker-ladies,
With eyes of heavenly hue,
Who, where the mossy shade is,
Hold quiet Quaker-meeting,
Now tell me, is it true
That these wild-bees are raiders?
Bold gold-galloonéd raiders?
Gold-belted ambuscaders?—
Or are they serenaders,
Your gold-hipped serenaders,
That, to your ears repeating
Old ballads, come to woo,
And win the hearts of you,
The golden hearts of you?
And here the bells of th’ huckleberries toss, so it seems, in time,
Delicate, tenderly white, thick by the wildwood way;
Clusters swinging, it seems, inaudible peals of rhyme,
Music visibly dropped from the virginal lips of the May,
Crystally dropped, so it seems, bar upon blossoming bar,
Pendent, pensively pale, star upon hollowed star.
IX
The star-flower now, that disks with gold
The woodland moss, the forest grass,
Already in a day is old,
Already doth its beauty pass;
Soon, undistinguished, with the mould
’Twill mingle and ’twill mix, alas.
The bluet, too, that spreads its skies,
Its little heavens, at our feet;
And crowfoot-bloom, that, with soft eyes
Of amber, now our eyes doth greet,
Shall fade and pass, and none surmise
How once they made the Maytime sweet.
X
But the crowfoot-bloom still trails its gold
Along the edges of the oak-wood old;
And there, where spreads the pond, still white are seen
The lilies islanded between
The pads’ round archipelagoes of green;
The jade-dark pads that pave
The water’s wrinkled wave;
In which the vireo and the sparrow lave
Their fluttered breasts and wings,
Preening their backs, with many twitterings,
With necks the moisture streaks;
Then dipping deep their beaks,
To which the beaded coolness clings,
They bend their mellow throats
And let the freshness trickle into notes.
And now you hear
The red-capped woodpecker rap near;
And now that acrobat,
The yellow-breasted chat,
Calls high and clear,
Chuckling his grotesque music from
Some bough that he hath clomb.
And now, and now,
Upon another bough,
Hark how the honey-throated thrush
Scatters the forest’s listening hush
With notes of limpid harmony,
Taking the woods with witchery—
Or is ’t a spirit, none can see.
Hid in the top of some old tree,
Who, in his house of leaves, of haunted green,
Keeps trying, silver-sweet, his sunbeam flute serene?