No wind is this which cries forlorn
Around the hilltops and the woods!—
Earth, weary of her multitudes
Of dead, despairing of the morn,
Calls through illimitable night
The wailing words no thing may know;
Deep in her memory-haunted sight
Sleeps no remembrance of delight,
But death and everlasting woe.
No wind! a voice whose sense is form;
A form whose sense is but a sound;
That smites the constant skies around,
And shakes the steadfast hills with storm:
Adown life’s desolate deep it cries
The words death’s sterile lips must learn
From Law, the Law that never dies—
Such utterless, wild speech as sighs
In stone and cinerary urn.
LX
I heard the wind, before the morn
Stretched gaunt, gray fingers ’thwart my pane,
Drive clouds down, a dark dragon train;
Its iron visor closed, a horn
Of steel from out the north it wound.—
No morn like yesterday’s! whose mouth,
A cool carnation, from the south
Breathed through a golden reed the sound
Of days that drop clear gold upon
Cerulean silver floors of dawn.
And all of yesterday is lost
And swallowed in to-day’s wild light—
The birth deformed of day and night,
The illegitimate, who cost
Its mother secret tears and sighs;
Unlovely since unloved; and chilled
With sorrows and the shame that filled
Its parents’ love; which was not wise
In passion as the night and day
That yestermorn made heaven all ray.
LXI
We know not of one mood that’s hers,
Or glad or grave, which has not drawn
Its source from God’s deep universe,
As th’ hours draw the day from dawn—
Nature’s! who holds us quietly
But earnestly, as by a spell,
Whose contact with us seems to be
Actual and yet intangible.
In us she thus asserts her claims
Of kinship and divine control;
God-teacher of exalted aims,
The high consents of heart and soul:
Imperfectly man sees and feels,
Through earthly mediums of his fate,
The premonitions she reveals
For issues that shall elevate.
LXII
Down through the dark, indignant trees,
On indistinguishable wings
Of storm, the wind of evening swings;
Before its insane anger flees
Distracted leaf and the shattered bough:
There is a rushing, as when seas
Of thunder beat an iron prow
On reefs of wrath and roaring wreck:
’Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speck
Of flickering blackness, driven by,
A mad bat whirls along the sky.