What alchemy does Earth conceal
Desired by the desperate days?
With feet of fog and hands of haze
They search the crumbling woods and steal
With mutterings,—gaunt as hags who deal
In witchcraft,—where each dark tree sways,
And, venerable, with staff aslant,
Death sits like some old mendicant.
Around me all’s despondency,
And grief that holds the unwilling world:
The last gold leaf is wildly hurled
Through sobbing silence over me:
The brook has hushed its wildwood glee,
Sick of itself; and far unfurled,
And melancholy as my soul,
The struggling lights of sunset roll.
LXVII
The song-birds, are they flown away,
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing hours to rhyme?
No catbird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of its song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along,
Thridding with vocal gold the hush.
All day the crows fly cawing past:
The acorns drop: the forests scowl:
At night I hear the bitter blast
Hoot with the hooting of the owl.
The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewn
With leaves that clog: beneath the tree
The bird, that set its toil to tune,
And made a home for melody,
Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.
THE MOATED GRANGE
“There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana."—Shakespeare.
The sunset-crimson poppies are departed,
Mariana!
The purple-centered, sultry-smelling poppies,
The drowsy-hearted,
That burnt like flames along the low yew coppice;
All heavy headed,
The ruby-cupped and opium-brimming poppies,
That slumber wedded,
Mariana!
The sunset-crimson poppies are departed.
Oh, heavy, heavy are the hours that fall,
The lonesome hours of the lonely days!
No poppy strews oblivion by the wall,
Where lone the last pod sways,—
Oblivion that was hers of old that happier made her days.
Oh, weary, weary is the sky o’er all,
The days that creep, the hours that crawl,
And weary all the ways—
She leans her face against the lichened wall,
The mildewed wall, the crumbling wall,
And dreams, the long, long days,
Of one who will not come again whatever may befall.
. . . . . . . . . . .