Behold, the winds have speech and speak!
The stars of heaven are eloquent!
A voice within us bids us seek
The word the flowers say in scent:
The paraclete encouragement
Of beauty that the burning scrolls
Of eve and morning give our souls.
There is one language of the mart;
Another of the rocks and trees:
Unrest and greed is this one’s heart;
The other’s heart is rest and peace:
Within our souls we know of these;
They lead us by the myths we love,
Yet never see and know not of.
L
When thorn-tree copses still were bare
And black along the turbid brook;
When catkined willows blurred and shook
Great tawny tangles in the air;
In bottomlands, the first thaw makes
An oozy bog, beneath the trees,
Prophetic of the spring that wakes,
Sang the sonorous hylodes.
Now that wild winds have stripped the thorn,
And clogged with leaves the forest-creek;
Now that the woods look brown and bleak,
And webs are frosty white at morn;
At night beneath the spectral sky,
A far foreboding cry I hear—
The wild-fowl calling as they fly?
Or vague voice of the dying Year?
LI
Night,—who within heaven’s uttermost
Dark walls uncloses shadowy gates,—
Beyond the Spirit of Light she hates,
Speeds like a ghost before a ghost
Upon the twilight-haunted coast
Of death between the seas of sleep:
Her lips are dumb with awe that hears;
And in her eyes, that never weep,
Is anguish of eternal tears.
Out of the terrible gulfs of God
Into God’s awful deeps she goes,
Revealing in heaven’s gold and rose
The ways her footsteps tread and trod
From period to period:
Her lips are still—for she hath heard
God’s voice that moves the universe:
Her eyes are sad beyond the word—
The eyes of Vastness gazed in hers.
LII
And still my soul holds phantom tryst,
When chestnuts hiss among the coals,
Upon the Evening of All Souls,
When all the night is moon and mist,
And all the world is mystery;
I kiss dear lips that death hath kissed,
And look in eyes no man may see,
Filled with a love long lost to me.