Unfathomed sweetness of your song,
With ancient anguish at its core,
What womb of elemental wrong,
With shudder unimagined, bore
Peace so divine—what hell hath trod
This voice that softly talks with God!
All silence in one silver flower
Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks
The moon in heaven, yet hath power
To tell the soul the thing it seeks.
And pack, as by some wizard's art,
The whole within the finite part.
To you, sweet bird, one well might feign—
With such authority you sing
So clear, yet so profound, a strain
Into the simple ear of spring—
Some secret understanding given
Of the hid purposes of Heaven.
And all my life until this day,
And all my life until I die,
All joy and sorrow of the way,
Seem calling yonder in the sky;
And there is something the song saith
That makes me unafraid of death.
Now the slow light fills all the trees,
The world, before so still and strange,
With day's familiar presences,
Back to its common self must change,
And little gossip shapes of song
The porches of the morning throng.
Not yours with such as these to vie
That of the day's small business sing,
Voice of man's heart and of God's sky—
But O you make so deep a thing
Of joy, I dare not think of pain
Until I hear you sing again.
ALMA VENUS
Only a breath—hardly a breath! The shore
Is still a huddled alabaster floor
Of shelving ice and shattered slabs of cold,
Stern wreckage of the fiercely frozen wave,
Gleaming in mailed wastes of white and gold;
As though the sea, in an enchanted grave,
Of fearful crystal locked, no more shall stir
Softly, all lover, to the April moon:
Hardly a breath! yet was I now aware
Of a most delicate balm upon the air,
Almost a voice that almost whispered "soon"!
Not of the earth it was—no living thing
Moves in the iron landscape far or near,
Saving, in raucous flight, the winter crow,
Staining the whiteness with its ebon wing,
Or silver-sailing gull, or 'mid the drear
Rock cedars, like a summer soul astray,
A lone red squirrel makes believe to play,
Nibbling the frozen snow.
Not of the earth, that hath not scent nor song,
Nor hope of aught, nor memory, nor dream,
Nor any speech upon its sullen tongue,
Nor any liberty of running stream;
Not of the earth, that hath forgot to smile;
But, strangely wafted o'er the frozen sea,
As from some hidden Cytherean isle,
Veil within veil, the sweetness came to me.