PHOEBE.
Ere pales in heaven the morning star,
A bird, the loneliest of its kind,
Hears dawn's faint footfall from afar,
While all its mates are dumb and blind.
It is a wee, sad-colored thing,
As shy and secret as a maid,
That, ere in choir the robins ring,
Pipes its own name like one afraid.
It seems pain-prompted to repeat
The story of some ancient ill,
But Phoebe! Phoebe! sadly sweet,
Is all it says, and then is still.
It calls and listens: earth and sky,
Hushed by the pathos of its fate,
Listen: no whisper of reply
Comes from the doom-dissevered mate.
Phoebe! it calls and calls again,
And Ovid, could he but have heard,
Had hung a legendary pain
About the memory of the bird;
A pain articulate so long
In penance of some mouldered crime,
Whose ghost still flies the furies' thong
Down the waste solitudes of time;
Phoebe! is all it has to say
In plaintive cadence o'er and o'er,
Like children that have lost their way
And know their names, but nothing more.
Is it in type, since Nature's lyre
Vibrates to every note in man,
Of that insatiable desire
Meant to be so, since life began?