But rain, that whipped the windows; filled
The spouts with rushing; and around
The garden stamped, and sowed the ground
With limbs and leaves; the wood-pool filled
With overgurgling.—Bleak and cold
The fields looked, where the foot-path wound
Through teasel and bur-marigold....
Yet there is kindness in such days
Of gloom, that doth console regret
With sympathy of tears, which wet
Old eyes that watch the back-log blaze—
A kindness, alien to the deep
Glad blue of sunny days that let
No thought in of the lives that weep.
XXXIV
This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers,—
As might a face within our sleep,
With stone-gray eyes that weep and weep,
And wet brows bound with sodden flowers,—
Is sunset to some sister land;
A land of ruins and of palms;
Rich sunset, crimson with long calms,—
Whose burning belt low mountains bar,—
That sees some brown Rebecca stand
Beside a well the camel-band
Winds down to ’neath the evening-star.
O sunset, sister to this dawn!
O dawn, whose face is turned away!
Who gazest not upon this day,
But back upon the day that’s gone!
Enamored so of loveliness,
The retrospect of what thou wast,
Oh, to thyself the present trust!
And as thy past make beautiful
With hues, that never can grow less!
Waiting thy pleasure to express
New beauty, lest the world grow dull.
XXXV
At daybreak from the woodland come
Echoes of hunting; or the chop
Of some far woodman’s axe, that cleaves
The tingling oak, whose russet leaves
Drop slowly where the white chips drop:
The air is fragrant with the loam,
Where, through the mists of steaming gold,
The sudden sun strikes fold on fold.
Out of the window, filmed with fog,
I look into the wreck which was
The kitchen-garden, drenched with rain;
Among the death I mark again
One blue convolvulus—that draws
A gray vignette along a log,
With pencilled tendrils washed and wan—
The garden-story’s colophon.
XXXVI
More storm than calm, less gold than gray,
Along the years our lives must tread,
Makes sad the scenes around our way,
Makes grave the heavens overhead:
For on life’s storied page, behold,
Are adumbrations of the dead!
The neutral tint Time’s fingers lay
Around a tale that’s never told.
Time writes with sunshine less than rain,
With starlight less than mist, the scroll—
A thousand memories of pain
To one of joy—of his own soul:
The golden hues of life occur
In his dim palimpsest, whose whole
Death scrawls with dusty lines again,
Making of all a leaden blur.