XXXVII
Down in the woods a sorcerer,
Out of rank rain and death, distils,—
Through chill alembics of the air,—
Aromas that brood everywhere
Among the dingles of the hills:
The bitter myrrh of dead leaves fills
Wet valleys (where the gaunt weeds bleach)
With sodden scents of wood decay;—
As if a spirit all the day
Sat breathing softly ’neath the beech.
With other eyes I see her flit,
The wood-witch of the wild perfumes,
Among her sleepy owls,—that sit,
A fluffy white, in crescent-lit
Dim glens and opalescent glooms:—
Where, for her magic, buds and blooms
Mysterious perfumes, while she stands,
A fragrant shadow, summoning
The eery odors that take wing,
Like bubbles, from her rainy hands.
XXXVIII
With leagues of fog, which showed the sun
An agate-red without a ray,
And drowned the world in ghostly gray,
The chill, autumnal day begun:
A phantom in the mist, a run
Foamed over phantom ledges lone
In forests that seemed far away,
Wild woods of immaterial stone.
With horses saffron to the knees
A country cart drove through the fog;
Its creaking wheels grown one great clog
Of clay, and clanking swingletrees:
Its smothered rumble did not cease
Till hidden in the woodland mist,
Where, leaning on his fresh-cut log,
The muffled woodman blew his fist.
Another world I wander in
Of unlaid ghosts and dreams unfled;
A twilight world of drowsy-head
And mystery, built figment-thin
Between the worlds of death and sin:
Where dim and strange and incomplete,
And substanceless, seem things not dead,
And sorrowful as dimly sweet.
XXXIX
Among the woods they call to me—
The lights that haunt the strand and stream;
Voices of such white ecstasy
As moves with hushed lips through a dream:
They stand in nimbused radiances,
Or flash with glittering limbs across
Their golden shadows on the moss,
Or slip in silver through the trees.
What love can give the heart in me
More hope and exaltation than
The hand of light that tips the tree
And beckons far from marts of man?
That reaches foamy fingers through
The broken ripple, and replies
With sparkling speech of lips and eyes
To souls who seek and still pursue.