Ah, the promising earth that seems so kind,
And the comrades with outstretched hand—
But did you ever stand alone
In a black, forsaken land?
Then the wonderful things that God can do
One comes to understand:
How He turns the desert dust to a dream,
And the lonely wind to a friend,
And makes a bright beginning
Of what had seemed the end:
'Twas in such an hour God placed in mine
The moonbeam hand of a friend.
"I THOUGHT, BEFORE MY SUNLIT TWENTIETH YEAR"
I thought, before my sunlit twentieth year,
That I knew Love, and Death that goes with it;
And my young broken heart in little songs,
Dew-like, I poured, and waited for my end
Wildly—and waited—being then nineteen.
I walked a little longer on my way,
Alive, 'gainst expectation and desire,
And, being then past twenty, I beheld
The face of all the faces of the world
Dewily opening on its stem for me.
Ah! so it seemed, and, each succeeding year,
Thus hath some woman blossom of the divine
Flowered in my path, and made a frail delay
In my true journey—to my home in thee.
October 27, 1911.
II
TO A BIRD AT DAWN
O bird that somewhere yonder sings,
In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn,
Lone in the hush of sleeping things,
In some sky sanctuary withdrawn;
Your perfect song is too like pain,
And will not let me sleep again.
I think you must be more than bird,
A little creature of soft wings,
Not yours this deep and thrilling word—
Some morning planet 'tis that sings;
Surely from no small feathered throat
Wells that august, eternal note.
As some old language of the dead,
In one resounding syllable,
Says Rome and Greece and all is said—
A simple word a child may spell;
So in your liquid note impearled
Sings the long epic of the world.