Chapter VIII: Part V: Winter (2)

The maple, as red as the delicate flush
Of an afterglow, was airy crimson;
And the haw-tree, white in the wing-whipped hush,
Gleamed cool as a cloud that the moonlight dims on;
And under the oak, whose branches strung--
Say, heigh, the rap o’ the sapsuckér!--
Gray buds in tassels that sweetly swung,
They stood and listened a bird that sung,
As glad as the heart in her.

Yellow the bloom of the rattle-weed,
And white the bloom of the plum and cherry;
And red as a stain the red-bud’s brede,
And clover the color of sherry:
And a wren sings there in the orchard drift,--
And, ho! the dew from the web that slips!--
And a thrush sings there in the woodland rift,
Where he to his face her face doth lift,
Her face with the willing lips.

For a while they sat on the moss and grass,
Where the forest bloomed a great wild garden;--
Then the beam from the hollow--it seemed to pass,
And the ray on the hills to harden,
When she rose to go, and his joy fell flat;--
And, heigh, the wasp i’ the pawpaw bell!--
As she waved her hand--why, it seemed at that
’Twas Spring’s own self he was gazing at,
And the life of his life as well.

III

The teasel and the horsemint spread
The hillsides, as with sunset sown,
Blooming along the Standing-Stone
That ripples in its rocky bed:
There are no treasuries that hold
Gold yellower than the marigold
That crowds its mouth and head.

’T is harvest-time: a mower stands
Among the morning wheat and whets
His scythe, and for a space forgets
The labor of the ripening lands;
Then bends, and through the dewy grain
His long scythe hisses, and again
He swings it in his hands.

And she beholds him where he mows
On acres whence the water sends
Faint music of reflecting bends
And falls that interblend with flows:
She stands among the old bee-gums,--
Where all the apiary hums,--
Like some sweet bramble-rose.

She hears him whistling as he leans,
And, reaping, sweeps the ripe wheat by;
She sighs and smiles and knows not why:--
These are but simple country scenes:
He whets his scythe again, and sees
Her smiling near the hives of bees
Beneath the flowering beans.

The peacock-purple lizard creeps
Along the rail; and deep the drone
Of insects makes the country lone
With summer where the water sleeps:
She hears him singing as he swings
His scythe; he thinks of other things--
Not toil, and, singing, reaps.

IV

Into the woods they went again,
Over the wind-blown oats;
Out of the acres of golden grain,
In where the light was a violet stain,
In where the lilies’ throats
Were brimmed with the summer rain.

Hung on a bough a reaper’s hook,
Over the wind-blown oats;
A girl’s glad laugh and a girl’s glad look,
And the hush and ripple of tree and brook,
And a wild bird’s silvery notes,
And a kiss that a strong man took.

Out of the woods the lovers went,
Over the wind-waved wheat;
She with a face, where love was blent,
Like to an open testament;
He, from his head to feet,
Dazed with his hope that was eloquent.

Here how oft had they come to tryst,
Over the wind-waved wheat!
Here how oft had they laughed and kissed!
Talked and tarried where no one wist,
Here where the woods are sweet,
Dim and deep as a dewy mist.

V

Her pearls are blossoms-of-the-vale,
Her only diamonds are the dews;
Such jewels never can grow stale,
Nor any value lose.

Among the millet beards she stands:
The languid wind lolls everywhere:
There are wild roses in her hands,
One wild rose in her hair.

To-morrow, where the shade is warm,
Among the unmown wheat she’ll stop,
And from one daisy-loaded arm
One ox-eyed daisy drop.

She’ll meet his brown eyes, true and brave,
With blue eyes, false yet dreamy sweet:
He is her lover and her slave,
Who mows among the wheat.

* * * * *

When buds broke on the apple trees
She wore an apple-blossom dress,
And laughed with him across the leas,
And love was all a guess.

When goose-plums ripened in the rain,
Plum-colored was her gown of red;
He kissed her in the creek-road lane--
She was his life, he said.

When apples thumped the droughty land,
A russet color was her gown:
Another came, and--won her hand?--
Nay! carried off to town....

When grapes hung purple in the hot,
None missed her and her simple dress,
Save one, whom, haply, she forgot,
Who loved her none the less.

When snow made white each harvest sheaf,
He sought her out amid her show;
Her rubies, redder than the leaf
That autumn forests sow.

Not one regret her shame reveals;
She smiles at him, then puts him by;
He pleads; and she? she merely steels
Her heart and--lives her lie.

VI

And he returned when poppies strewed
Their golden blots o’er moss and leaf,--
Blond little Esaus of the wood,
So fair of face, of life so brief.--
Did he forget?--Not he, in truth!--
“No month,” he thought, “holds so much grace,
No month of spring, such grace and youth,
As the sweet April of her face.”

In fall the frail gerardia
Hung hints of sunset and of dawn
On root and rock, as if to draw
Her lips, remind him of one gone:--
Of one unworthy, in pursuit
Of butterflies, who does not dream
A flower, broken by her foot,
Sweeps, helpless, with her down the stream.

SOME SUMMER DAYS

I

If you had seen her waiting there
Among the tiger-lily blooms,--
That sowed their jewels everywhere
Among the woodland gleams and glooms,--
You had confessed her very fair,
And sweeter than the wood’s perfumes.

A country girl with bare brown feet,
She waits, while day slopes down the deeps:
The afternoon is dead with heat,
And all the weary shadow sleeps
Like toil, arm-pillowed in the wheat,
Beside the scythe with which he reaps.

There is no sound more distant than
The cow-bell on the vine-hung hill;
No nearer than the locust’s span
Of noise that makes the silence shrill:
And now there comes a sun-browned man
Through tiger-lilies of the rill.

Long will they talk: till, in the end,
The clear west glows, the east grows pale;
Until the glow and pallor blend
Like moonlight on a shifting sail;
And then he ’ll clasp her; she will bend
Her head, consenting. Day will fail:

The west will flame, then fade away
Through heavy orange, rose, and red,
And leave the heavens violet gray
Above a gypsy-lily bed:
Then they will go; and he will say
Such words to her as none has said.

A million stars the night will win
Above them; and one firefly
Pulse like a tangled starbeam in
The cedar dark against the sky:
Then he will lift her dimpled chin
And take the kiss she ’ll not deny.

And when the moon, like the great book
Of Judgment, golden with the light
Of God, lies open o’er yon nook
Of darkest wood and wildest height,
Together they will cross the brook
And reach the gate and kiss good night.

II

And now he wipes his hand along
The beaded fire of his brow
Hard toil has heated; and the strong
Face flushes fuller health as now
He fills his hay-fork to the prong,
And, tossing it, again doth bow.

And now he rests, and looks away
Across the sun-fierce hills and meads
No rolling cloud has cooled to-day;
And from his face the brawny beads
Drip; and he marks the heaps of hay,
The fields of corn, the fields of weeds.

At last he sees the tempest build
Black battlements along the west,
Black breastworks that are thunder filled;
And bares his brow; and on his chest
The sweat of toil is cooled; and stilled
The pulse of toil within his breast.

A strong wind brings the odorous death
Of far hay-meadows, and the scent
Is good within his nostrils’ breath:
The mighty trees are bowed, that leant
For no man, as when Power saith
“Bow down!” and stalwart men are bent.

He laughs, long-gazing as he goes
Along the elder-sweetened lane:
He feels the storm wind as it blows
Across the sheaves of golden grain,
And stops to pull one bramble-rose,
And watch the swiftly coming rain.

And there, ’mid locust trees, the farm
Dreams in a martin-haunted place:
He marks the far-off streaks of storm
That, driven of the thunder, race:
He sees his child upon her arm,
And in the door his wife’s fair face.

III

Below the sunset’s range of rose,
Below the heaven’s bending blue,
Down woodways where the balsam blows,
And milkweed tufts hang, gray of hue,
A Jersey heifer stops and lows--
The cows come home by one, by two.

There is no star yet: but the smell
Of hay and pennyroyal mix
With herb-aromas of the dell;
And the root-hidden cricket clicks:
Among the ironweeds a bell
Clangs near the rail-fenced clover-ricks.

She waits upon the slope beside
The windlassed well the plum-trees shade,
The well-curb that the goose-plums hide;
Her light hand on the bucket laid,
Unbonneted she waits, glad-eyed,
Her dress as simple as her braid.

She sees fawn-colored backs among
The sumacs now; a tossing horn;
A clashing bell of brass that rung:
Long shadows lean upon the corn,
And all the day dies scarlet-stung,
The cloud in it a rosy thorn.

Below the pleasant moon, that tips
The tree-tops of the hillside, fly
The evening bats; the twilight slips
Some fireflies like spangles by;
She meets him, and their happy lips
Touch; and one star leaps in the sky.

He takes her bucket, and they speak
Of married hopes while in the grass
The plum lies glowing as her cheek;
The patient cows look back or pass;
And in the west one golden streak
Burns like a great cathedral glass.

IV

The skies are amber, blue, and green
Before the coming of the sun;
And all the deep hills sleep, serene
As if enchanted; every one
Is ribbed with morning mists that lean
On woods through which vague whispers run.

Birds wake: and on the vine-hung knobs,
Above the brook, a twittering
Confuses songs; one warbler robs
Another of its note; a wing
Beats by; and now a wild throat throbs
Triumphant; all the woodlands sing.

The sun is up: the hills are heaped
With instant splendor; and the vales
Surprised with shimmers that are steeped
In purple where the thin mist trails;
The water-fall, the rock it leaped,
Are burning gold that foams and fails.

He drives his horses to the plow
Along the vineyard slopes, where bask
Dew-heavy grapes, half-ripened now,
In sun-shot shafts of shade: no mask
Of joy he wears; his face and brow
Glow as he enters on his task.

Before him, soaring through the mist,
The gray hawk wildly wings and screams;
Its dewy back gleams, sunbeam-kissed,
Above the wood that drips and dreams;
He guides the plow with one strong fist;
The soil rolls back in level seams.

Packed to the right the sassafras
Lifts leafy walls of spice that shade
The blackberries, whose tendrils mass
Big berries in the coolness made;
And drop their ripeness on the grass
Where trumpet-flowers fall and fade.

White on the left the fence and trees
That mark the garden; and the smoke,
Uncurling in the early breeze,
Tells of the roof beneath the oak;
He turns his team, and, turning, sees
The damp, dark soil his coulter broke.

Bees hum; and o’er the berries poise
Lean-bodied wasps; loud blackbirds turn
Following the plow: there is a noise
Of insect wings that buzz and burn;--
And now he hears his wife’s low voice,
The song she sings to help her churn.

V

There are no clouds that drift around
The moon’s pearl-kindled crystal, (white
As some sky-summoned spirit wound
In raiment lit with limbs of light),
That have not softened like the sound
Of harps when Heaven forgets to smite.

The vales are deeper than the dark,
And darker than the vales the woods
That shadowy hill and meadow mark
With broad, blurred lines, whereover broods
Deep calm; and now a fox-hound’s bark
Upon the quietude intrudes.

And though the night is never still,
Yet what we name its noises makes
Its silence:--now a whippoorwill;
A frog, whose hoarser tremor breaks
The hush; then insect sounds that fill
The night; an owl that hoots and wakes.

They lean against the gate that leads
Into the lane that lies between
The yard and orchard; flowers and weeds
Smell sweeter than the odors keen
That day distils from hotness; beads
Of dew make cool the gray and green.

Their infant sleeps. They feel the peace
Of something done that God has blessed,
Still as the pulse that will not cease
There in the cloud that lights the west:
The peace of love that shall increase
While soul to soul still gives its best.

AN EPIC OF SOUTH-FORK

I

The wild brook gleams on the sand and ripples
Over the rocks of the riffle; brimming
Under the elms like a nymph who dripples,
Dips and glimmers and shines in swimming:
Under the linns and the ash-trees lodging,
Loops of the limpid waters lie,
Shaken of schools of the minnows, dodging
The glancing wings of the dragon-fly.

Lower, the loops are lines of laughter
Over the stones and the crystal gravel;
Afar they gloom, like a face seen after
Mirth, where the waters slowly travel;
Shadowy slow where the Fork is shaken
Of the dropping bark of the sycamore,
Where the water-snake, that the footsteps waken,
Slides like a crooked root from shore.

Peace of the forest; and silence, dimmer
Than dreams. And now a wing that winnows
The willow leaves, with their shadows slimmer
In the shallow there than a school of minnows:
Calm of the creek; and a huge tree twisted,
Ringed, and turned to a tree of pearl;
A gray-eyed man, who is farmer-fisted,
And a dark-eyed, sinewy country girl.

The brow of the man is gnarled and wrinkled
With the weight of the words that have just been spoken;
And the girl has smiled and her eyes have twinkled,
Though the bonds and the bands of their love lie broken:
She smiles, nor knows how the days have knotted
Her to the heart of the man who says:
“Let us follow the paths that we think allotted.
I will go my ways and you your ways.

“And the man between us is your decision.
Worse or better he is your lover.--
Shall I say he ’s worse since the sweet Elysian
Prize he wins where I discover
Only the hell of the luckless chooser?--
Shall I say he ’s better than I, or more,
Since he is winner and I am loser,
His life ’s made rich and mine made poor?”

“I tell you now as I oft and ever
Have told,” she answered, the laughter dying
Down in her eyes, “that his arms have never
Held me!--no!--but you think me lying,
And you are wrong. And I think it better
To part forever than still to dwell
With the sad distrust, like an evil tetter,
On our lives forever, and so farewell.”

And she turned away; and he watched her going,
The girlish pride in her eyes a-smoulder:
He saw her go, and his lips were glowing
Fever that parched. And he stood, one shoulder
Slouched to the tree; and he saw her stooping,
There by the bank, with a reckless foot;
Straighten; and tear from her breast his drooping
Lilies and fasten the pleurisy-root.

With its orange fire he saw her passing
On and on; and the blood beat, burning
His brain to madness; and seemingly massing
The weight of the world on his heart in yearning ...
Butterflies swarmed in the moist sand-alleys;
A fairy fleet of Ionian sails
They seemed with their wings, or of pirate galleys,
Maroon and yellow, for Elfland gales.

He watched her going; and harder, thicker
The pulse of his breath and his heart’s hard throbbing.--
How should he know that her heart was sicker?
How should he know that her soul was sobbing?--
She never looked back: and he saw her vanish
In swirls of the startled butterflies,
Like a storm of flowers; and he could not banish
The thought he had lost his all through lies.

II

He heard the cocks crow out the lonely hours.
How long the night! how far away the dawn!
It seemed long months since he had seen the flowers,
The leaves, the sunlight, and the bee-hived lawn;
Had heard the thrush flute in the tangled showers.

His burning eyes ached, staring at the black
Stolidity of midnight. Would God send
No cool relief unto his mind,--a rack
Of inquisition,--tortures to unbend,
That stretched him forward and now strained him back?

Incomprehensible and undivulged,
The thought that took him back, retraced their walks,
Through woods, on which the sudden perfumes bulged,
The bird-songs and the brilliant-blossomed stalks;
And all the freedom which their talk indulged.

Oh, strong appeal! And he would almost yield;
When, firmly forward, he could feel her fault
Oppose the error of a rock-like shield,
And to resisting phalanxes cry halt--
And, lo! bright cohorts broken on the field.

O mulct of morning! to the despot night
Count down unminted gold, and let the day
Walk free from dungeons of the dark; delight
Herself on mountains of the violet ray,
Clad in white maidenhood and morning white!

A melancholy coast, plunged deep in dream
And death and silence, stretched the drowsy dark,
Wherein he heard a round-eyed screech-owl scream,
In lamentation, and a watch-dog bark,
Vague as oblivion, lost in night’s deep stream.

And then hope moved him to divide the blinds
To see if those bright sparkles were a star’s,
Or but his feverish eyelids, which the mind’s
Commotion weighed.--No hint of morning bars
With glimmer heaven’s swart tapestry he finds.

So he remained, impatient, till the first
Exploring crevices of Aztec morn,
Dim cracks of treasure, Eldorados burst:
Then could he face his cowardice and scorn
His jealousy that thus his life had cursed.

Love knew no barriers now. And where he went
Each woodland path was musical with birds;
Each flow’r was richer, more divine of scent;
For love sought love with such expressive words
That dawn’s delivery was less eloquent.

III

Who is it hunts with his dog
There where the heron is flying
Gray through the feathering fog
Over the Fork, where is lying,
Bridge-like, a butternut log,
There where the horsemint is drying?

Who is it hunts in the brush,
Under the linns and the beeches,
Here where the water-falls rush,
Dark, where the noon never reaches?
Here where the Fork is one crush
Of flags with a bloom like the peach’s?

He is handsome and supple and tall,
Blond-haired and vigorous-chested,
Blue-eyed as the bud by the fall
Where he listens,--his rifle half rested,
Half leaned on the crumbling stone wall,--
Whose briers he lately has breasted.

He waits; and the sun on the dew
Of the cedars and leaves of the bushes
Strikes glittering frostiness through ...
If a covey of partridges flushes
What good will a Winchester do,
Or the dog to his feet that he crushes?

Then a man breaks strong through the weeds
Where the buck-bushes toss and the spires
Of the white-blossomed cohosh; ’mid reeds
Wild-carrots, and trammelling briers:
It is he! to his loved one who speeds--
And the man in the bushes--he fires....

From leaves of the wind-shaken wood
The dew of the dawn is still falling:
He is gone from the place where he stood,
Just there where the black crow is calling:
There is blood on the weeds: is it blood
On the face of the man who is crawling?

Red blood or a smudge of the dawn?--
Now he lies with his gray eyes wide, staring,
Stiff, still at the sun: he has drawn
His limbs in a heap: and the faring
Bee-martins light near or pass on,
Not one of them knowing or caring.

It is noon: and the wood-dove is deep
In the calm of its cooing: and over
The tops of the forest trees sweep
The shadows of buzzards that hover:
Wide-winged they sail on as asleep:
And the bob-white is whistling from cover.

It is dusk: and the heat, that made wilt
The leaves and the wildflowers’ faces,
Gives place to the dew-drops that tilt
With coolness the weeds where are traces
Of horror and darkness and guilt,
That nothing can wash from those places.

It is night: and the hoot-owlet mocks
The dove of the day with wild weeping,
The Fork is scarce heard on its rocks
Where the man is so quietly sleeping:
Through the woods snaps the bark of a fox;
The lightning is fitfully leaping.

IV

All day, ’twixt hope and fear,
She waited at the gate,
Looking for him, more dear
Now that he made her wait:
Day went and night draws near:
Stormy it grows and late.

Still, still she waits: great limbs
The winds rend from the ridge;
Each swollen shallow swims
Head-deep below the bridge;
The drift, that breaks and brims
Swirls lighter than the midge.

The night grows wildly gray
With lightning-litten rain;
The forests sound and sway,
An oak is rent in twain;
The thunder rolls away
Like some vast bolt and chain.

The Fork is whirling wreck
Of field and farm and wood;
And many a foaming fleck
Drives where the rock-fence stood;--
A torrent sweeps break-neck
Above the washed-out blood.

Night deepens: still she waits
Expectant in despair:
The Fork has reached the gates,
The wood’s wreck everywhere.
But when the storm abates,
She thinks, he will be there.

She sees the lightning rush
Its blazing hells above;
She hears the thunder crush
Heaven as if earthquake-clove--
Loud in the tempest’s hush
She calls with all her love.

He comes, she feels; and stands
The rushing waters o’er
Her feet, and on her hands
And hair the wild down-pour,
The lightnings are wild brands
To light him to her door.

Night deepens: but she knows
God will not fail to send
Her love to soothe her woes,
And one day’s errors mend.--
The wild stream foams and flows
Booming in fall and bend.

Again the lightnings light
The night like some wild torch;
The waters foam and fight;
And one uprooted larch
Sweeps down, with something white
Wedged in it, by her porch.

She stoops: the lurid rain
Beats on her back and head--
Ay! he hath come again!
With livid lips once red!
A bullet in his brain
The night hath brought him--dead!

A NIELLO

I

It is not early spring and yet
Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
And blotted banks of violet,
My heart will dream.

Is it because the wind-flower apes
The beauty that was once her brow,
That the white thought of it still shapes
The April now?

Because the wild-rose learned its blush
From her fresh cheeks of maidenhood,
Their thought makes June of barren brush
And empty wood?

And then I think how young she died--
Straight, barren death stalks down the trees,
The hard-eyed hours by his side
That kill and freeze.

II

When orchards are in bloom again
My heart will bound, my blood will beat,
To hear the red-bird so repeat,
On boughs of rosy stain,
His blithe, loud song,--like some far strain
From out the past,--among the bloom,--
(Where bee, and wasp, and hornet boom)--
Fresh, redolent with rain.

When orchards are in bloom once more,
Invasions of lost dreams will draw
My feet, like some insistent law,
Through blossoms to her door:
In dreams I’ll ask her, as before,
To let me help her at the well;
And fill her pail; and long to tell
My love as once of yore.

I shall not speak until we quit
The farm-gate, leading to the lane
And orchard, all in bloom again,
’Mid which the wood-doves sit
And coo; and through whose blossoms flit
The cat-birds crying while they fly:
Then tenderly I’ll speak, and try
To tell her all of it.

And in my dream again she’ll place
Her hand in mine, as oft before,--
When orchards are in bloom once more,--
With all her old-time grace:
And we will tarry till a trace
Of sunset dyes the heav’ns; and then--
We’ll part, and, parting, I again
Will bend and kiss her face.

And homeward, dreaming, I will go
Along the cricket-chirring ways,
While sunset, like one crimson blaze
Of blossoms, lingers low:
And my lost youth again I’ll know,
And all her love, when spring is here--
Hers! hers! now dead this many a year
Whose love still haunts me so.

III

I would not die when Springtime lifts
The white world to her maiden mouth,
And heaps its cradle with gay gifts,
Breeze-blown from out the singing South:
Too full of life and loves that cling,
Too heedless of all mortal woe,
The young, unsympathetic Spring,
That death should never know.

I would not die when Summer shakes
Her daisied locks below her hips,
And, naked as a star that takes
A cloud, into the silence slips.
Too rich is Summer; poor in needs;
Wrapped in her own warm loveliness
Her pomp goes by, and never heeds
If one be more or less.

But I would die when Autumn goes,
The sad rain dripping from her hair,
Through forests where the wild wind blows
Death and the red wreck everywhere:
Sweet as love’s last farewells and tears
’T would be to die, when heavens are gray,
In the old autumn of my years,
Like a dead leaf borne far away.

DEEP IN THE FOREST

I

SPRING ON THE HILLS

Ah, shall I follow, on the hills,
The Spring, as wild wings follow?
Where wild-plum trees make wan the hills,
Crab-apple trees the hollow,
Haunts of the bee and swallow?

In red-bud brakes and flowery
Acclivities of berry;
In dogwood dingles, showery
With dew, where wrens make merry?
Or drifts of swarming cherry?

In valleys of wild-strawberries,
And of the clumped May-apple;
Or cloud-like trees of hawberries,
With which the south-winds grapple,
That brook and pathway dapple?

With eyes of far forgetfulness,--
Like some white wood-thing’s daughter,
Whose feet are bee-like fretfulness,--
To see her run like water
Through boughs that slipped or caught her.

O Spring, to seek, yet find you not,
To search and still continue;
To glimpse, to touch, but bind you not,
To lose and then to win you,
All sweet evasion in you.

In pearly, peach-blush distances
You gleam; the woods are braided
Of myths, of dream-existences;--
There, where the brook is shaded,
Some splendor surely faded.

O presence, like the primrose’s,
Once more I feel your power!
In rainy scents of dim roses
I breathe you for an hour,
Elusive as a flower.

II

THE WOOD SPIRIT

Ah me! I still remember
How flushed, before the shower,
The dusk was; like a scarlet rose,
Or blood-red poppy-flower.

Now heaven is starred; the moonlight
Lays blurs upon the grain--
You may not know it from white frost,
The moonlight on the rain.

And all the forest utters
A restless moan in rest,
For all the deep, dark shadow lies
Like iron on its breast.

I mark the moveless shadow,
I mark the unreaped corn,
Then something whispers overhead,
“Come to me, mortal-born.”

I sit alone and listen;
The low leaves sound and sigh;
The dew drips from the bearded grain,
A mist slips from the sky.--

I hear her whisper, whisper,
And breathe in some dim place;
Her feet are easier than the dew,
And than the mist her face.

I may not clasp her ever,
This spirit made for song,
Who dwelleth in the young, young oak
The old, old oaks among.

Her limbs are molded moonlight;
Her breasts are silver moons:
She glimmers and she glitters where
The purple shadow swoons.

And since she knows I love her,
She says my soul has died,
And laughs and mocks me in the mist
That haunts the forest-side.

When winds run mad in woodlands
And all the great boughs swing,
I see her wild hair blow and blow
Black as a raven’s wing.

When winds are tamed and tethered
And stars are keen as frost,
I search and seek within the wood,
There where my soul was lost.

I seek her, and she flies me;
I follow; and the whole
Dim woodland echoes with her voice,
Soft calling to my soul.

III

OWL ROOST

The slope is a mass of vines:
If you walk in the daylight there,
A gleam as of twilight shines
Through the vines massed everywhere:
Each trunk, that a creeper twines,
Is a column, strong to bear
The dome of its leaves that wave,
Cathedral-dim and grave.

Black moss makes silent the feet:
And, above, the fox-grapes lace
So thick that the noonday heat
Is chill as a murdered face:
And the winds for miles repeat
The fugue of a rolling bass:
The deep leaves twinkle and turn
But over no flower or fern.

An angular spider weaves
Great webs between the trees,
Webs that are witches’ sieves:
And honey-and bumblebees
Go droning among the leaves,
Like the fairies’ oboës:
At dark the owlets croon
To the stars and the sickle-moon.

At dark I will not go
There where the branches sigh;
Where naught but the glow-worms glow,
Each one like a demon’s eye:
O’er which, like a battle-bow,
With an arrow that it lets fly,
The new-moon and one star
Hang and glimmer afar.

At dawn, if my mood be dim,
And the day be a cloudless one,
There where the sad winds hymn
I ’ll walk, but its shade will shun;
Its shade, where I feel the grim
Horror of something done
Here in the years long past,
That the place conceals to the last.

IV

MOSS AND FERN

Where rise the brakes of bramble there,
Wrapped with the trailing rose,
Through cane where waters ramble, there
Where deep the green cress grows,
Who knows?
Perhaps, unseen of eyes of man,
Hides Pan.

Perhaps the creek, whose pebbles make
A foothold for the mint,
May bear,--where soft its trebles make
Confession,--some vague hint--
(The print,
Goat-hoofed, of one who lightly ran)--
Of Pan.

Where, in the hollow of the hills
Ferns deepen to the knees,
What sounds are those above the hills,
And now among the trees?--
No breeze!--
The syrinx, haply, none may scan,
Of Pan.

In woods where waters break upon
The hush like some soft word;
Where sun-shot shadows shake upon
The moss, who has not heard--
No bird!--
The flute, as breezy as a fan,
Of Pan?

Far in, where mosses lay for us
Still carpets, cool and plush;
Where bloom and branch and ray for us
Swoon in the noonday flush,
The hush
May sound the satyr hoof a span
Of Pan.

In woods where thrushes sing to us,
And brooks dance sparkling heels;
Where wild aromas cling to us,
And all our worship kneels,--
Who steals
Upon us, haunch and face of tan,
But Pan?

V

WOODLAND WATERS

Through leaves of the nodding trees,
Where blossoms sway in the breeze,
Pink bag-pipes made for the bees,
Whose slogan is droning and drawling:
Where the columbine scatters its bells,
And the wild bleeding-heart its shells,
O’er mosses and rocks of the dells
The brook of the forest is falling.

You can hear it under the hill
When the wind in the wood is still,
And, strokes of a fairy drill,
Sounds the bill of the yellow-hammer:
By the solomon’s-seal it slips,
Cohosh and the grass that drips--
Like the words of an Undine’s lips,
Is the sound of its falls that stammer.

I lie in the woods: and the scent
Of the honeysuckle is blent
With the sound: and a Sultan’s tent
Is my dream, with the East enmeshéd:--
A slave-girl sings; and I hear
The languor of lute-strings near,
And a dancing-girl of Cashmere
In the harem of good Er Reshid.

From ripples of Irak lace
She flashes the amorous grace
Of her naked limbs and her face,
While her golden anklets tinkle:
Then over mosaic floors
Open seraglio doors
Of cedar: by twos, by fours,--
Like stars that tremble and twinkle,--

While the dulcimers sing, unseen,
The handmaids come of the Queen
’Neath silvern lamps, one sheen
Of jewels of Afrite treasure:
And I see the Arabia rise
Of the Nights that were rich and wise,
Beautiful, dark, in the eyes
Of Zubeideh, the Queen of Pleasure.

VI

THE THORN-TREE

The night is sad with silver and the day is glad with gold,
And the woodland silence listens to a legend never old,
Of the Lady of the Fountain, whom the fairy people know,
With her limbs of samite whiteness and her hair of golden glow,
Whom the boyish South-wind seeks for and the girlish-stepping rain,
Whom the sleepy leaves still whisper men shall never see again;
She whose Vivien charms were mistress of the magic Merlin knew,
That could change the dew to glow-worms and the glow-worms into dew.

There’s a thorn-tree in the forest, and the fairies know the tree,
With its branches gnarled and wrinkled as a face with sorcery;
But the May-time brings it clusters of a rainy fragrant white,
Like the bloom-bright brows of beauty or a hand of lifted light.
And all day the silence whispers to the sun-ray of the morn
How the bloom is lovely Vivien and how Merlin is the thorn:
How she won the doting wizard with her naked loveliness
Till he told her demon secrets that but made his magic less.

How she charmed him and enchanted in the thorn-tree’s thorns to lie
Forever with his passion that should never dim or die:
And with wicked laughter looking on this thing that she had done,
Like a visible aroma lingered sparkling in the sun;
How she stooped to kiss the pathos of an elf-lock of his beard,
All in mockery, at parting, and mock pity of his weird:
But her magic had forgotten that “who bends to give a kiss
Will bring down the curse upon them of the person whose it is”:
So the silence tells the secret.--And at night the fairies see
How the tossing bloom is Vivien, who is struggling to be free,
In the thorny arms of Merlin, who, forever, is the tree.

VII

THE HAMADRYAD

She stood among the longest ferns
The valley held; and in her hand
One blossom like the light that burns,
Vermilion, o’er a sunset land;
And round her hair a twisted band
Of pink-pierced mountain-laurel blooms:
And darker than dark pools, that stand
Below the star-communing glooms,
Her eyes beneath her hair’s perfumes.

I saw the moon-pearl sandals on
Her flower-white feet, that seemed too chaste
To tread pure gold: and, like the dawn
On splendid peaks that lord a waste
Of solitude lost gods have graced,
Her face: she stood there, faultless-hipped,
Bound with the cestused silver,--chased
With acorn-cup and crown, and tipped
With oak-leaves,--whence her chiton slipped.

Limbs that the gods call loveliness!--
The grace and glory of all Greece
Wrought in one marble form were less
Than her perfection!--’Mid the trees
I saw her; and time seemed to cease
For me--And, lo! I lived my old
Greek life again of classic ease,
Barbarian as the myths that rolled
Me back into the Age of Gold.

WRECKAGE

I

Love and the drift of many dreams,
Under the moon of a Florida night,
Over the beach with its silvery seams
White as a sail is white.

Love that entered into two lives
Out of the dreams that the nights have borne,
Over the waves where the vapor drives,
Mists that the stars have torn.

Love that welded two hearts and hands
There by the sea, ’neath the shell-white moon,
Like to the stars and the mists and the sands
Setting two lives in tune.

Nights of love that one still keeps
Sacred;--nights, that the faith of one
Heartened there in the treacherous deeps,
Under a tropic sun.

II

Parting he said to her: “Let us be true to them,--
All of our dreams, of the night, of the morning:
What is our present, its hope, but a clew to them?
What is our past but a dream and a warning?
Have you considered the life that regretfully
Foldeth weak arms to the fate it might master?--
Had I been true to my dreams, never fretfully
Halted, my future and joy had been faster.”

They had come down to the ocean that, bellowing,
Boiled on the sand and the shells that were broken;
All of the summer was fading and yellowing;
Now they must part and their vows had been spoken.
It had befallen that heaven was lowering;
Over the sea, like the wraith of a wrecker,
Clamored the gull; and the mist in the showering
East seemed the ghost of a lofty three-decker.

Infinite foam; and the boom of the hollowing
Breakers that buried the rocks to their shoulders;
Battle and boast of the deep in the wallowing
World of the waves where the red sunset smoulders.
Long was the leap of the foam on the thunderous
Beach; and each end of the beach was a flying
Fog of the spray: and she said, “Let it sunder us!
Still we will love, for love is undying!”

Yet, if it comes to the thing he has said to her?--
Wreckage and death?--the love she has given
Turned into sorrow?--Oh, that was a dread to her!
He, like a weed, by the waters far driven!
Weeping, her bosom with shudders was shaken as
She for a moment hard clung to her sailor,
Kissed him and--parted. His boat had been taken; as
Paler it grew the woman grew paler.

III

All day the rain drove, falling
Upon the sombre sea;
All day, his wet sail hauling,
The sailor tacked a-lea;
And through the wild rain calling,
What was it?--was it he?

At dusk the gull clanged, drifting
Above the boiling brine;
And, through the wan west sifting,
Streamed one red sunset line;
And in its wild light shifting,
His far sail seemed to shine.

All night the wind wailed, sighing
Along the wreck-strewn coast;
All night the surf, defying,
Rolled thunder in and boast;
All night she heard a crying--
The sea? or some lost ghost?

IV

The balm of the night and the glory,
The music and scent of the sea,
Are as song to her heart or a story
Of the never-to-be.
The stars and the night and the whiteness
Of foam on the stretch of the sand;
Faint foam that is tossed, like the brightness
Of a mermaiden’s hand.

No sail on the ocean; no sailor
On shore, and the winds all asleep;
And her face in the starlight far paler
Than women who weep.
A mist on the deep; and the ghostly
White moon in the deep of the night;
And a light that is neither; that mostly
Is shadow not light.

No sea-gull, that vanished with gleaming
Of wings, in the swing of the spray;
Perhaps it was only her dreaming,
Or merely a ray
Of moonlight; the glimmering essence
Of all that is grayest and dim--
But never his face, or his presence
That dripped in each limb.

And she cried through the night, “Let perish!
O God, let me die of despair!
If he whom I love, whom I cherish,
Is weltering there!”
She seemed but a sea-mist made woman,
And he but a sound of the sea
Made man where nothing was human,
And never would be.

V

Long he sailed the deep that glasses
The face of God and His majesty;
Passed the Horn and the Seas of Grasses,
Drifting aimlessly.
Time went by with its days that ever
Burden the hearts of those who be
Far away from their love; whom sever
Leagues of the shapeless sea.

Land at last, whose reefs rolled broken
Foam of the balked waves everywhere;
Land; one tangle of weeds and oaken
Wreck and of rocks laid bare.
Here and there the sand stretched livid
Leagues of famine, one blinding glare;
Crags, o’er which gaunt birds winged vivid,
Harsh in the earthquake air.

A little cloud in the sunset’s splendor;
A little cloud that the sunset stains:
Night, and a wisp of a moon that, slender,
Dreams of the hurricanes.
Winds that stride as with sounding sandals;
Winds that the tempest has loosed from chains:
Light that leaps like a spear he handles,
Shaking his thunder-manes.

Wrenching the world in wreck asunder,
Black rebellion of hell and night;
Wrath and roar of the rocks and thunder,
Flame and the winds that fight ...
Beating the drift and the hush together,
Waves and winds that the morn makes white;
Calm and peace of the tropic weather
After the typhoon’s might.

Clouds blow by and the storm’s forgotten.
Savage coasts where the sea-cow feeds.
Wash of weeds and the sea-weeds rotten.
And a dead face in the weeds.
None to know him or name him brother;
Only the savage in feathers and beads;
The South-Sea Islander, fitting another
Barb in the shaft he speeds.

Far away where the sea-gulls gather;
Far away where the evening falls,
Lone she stands where the wild waves lather,
Rolling the sea in walls.--
Who shall tell her, the lonely tryster?
Tell her of him on whom she calls?--
Suns that beat on his face and blister?
Stars? or the sea that crawls?

VI

She dreamed that there, beside the ocean sitting,
Alone she watched, when, at her feet, behold!
Between the foam-ridge and the sea-gull’s flitting,
His body rolled.

All was not as it was before they parted;
She dreamed he had remembered, she forgot;
He ’d said he would forget her, angry-hearted,
And yet could not.

And then it seemed that, had she known, she surely
Had given pity when she could not give
Her love to him, who loved her madly, purely,
And bade him live.

And then she dreamed she looked upon the slanted
Hulk of a wreck: and high above the wave,
Worn of the wind and of the cactus planted,
His nameless grave.

SIREN SANDS

I

The rhododendrons bloom and shake
Their petals wide and gleam and sway
Among palmettoes, by the lake,
Beyond the bay.

Shores where we watched the eve reveal
Her cloudy sanctuaries, while
The bay lay lavaed into steel
For mile on mile.

We watched the purple coast confuse
Soft outlines with the graying light;
And towards the gulf a vessel lose
Itself in night.

We saw the sea-gulls dip and soar;
The wild-fowl gather past the pier;
And from rich skies, as from God’s door,
Gold far and near.

Two foreign seamen passed and we
Heard mellow Spanish; like twin stars,
Where they lounged smoking, we could see
Their faint cigars.

Night; and the heavens stained and strewn
With stars the waters idealized,
Until their light the rising moon
Epitomized.

Morn; and the pine-wood balms awake;
Winds roll the dew-drop from the rose;
The wide lake burns; and, on the lake,
The ripple glows.

Far coasts detach deep purple from
The blue horizon, and the day
Beholds the sunburnt sailor come
And sail away.

The bird that slept at dusk, at dawn
Awakes again within the thorn.--
Sweet was the night to it, now gone;
And sweet is morn.

II

Through halls of columned scarlet,
Like some dark queen, the Dusk
Trails skirts of myrrh and musk,
Hung in each ear, a starlet
Gleams,--gems the clouds’ gaunt Jinn
Guard; and, beneath her chin,
The moon, an opal tusk.

There lies a ghostly glory
Upon the sea and sand;
A gleam, as of a hand,
Stretched from the realms of story,
Of rosy golden ray;
Pointing the world the way
To some far Fairyland.

As fades the west’s vermilion
Above the distant coasts,
The stars come out in hosts;
Within the night’s pavilion,
As flower speaks to flower,
Dim hour calls to hour,
Pale with the past’s sweet ghosts.

III

Music that melts through moonlight,
Faint on the summer breeze;
Fireflies, moonlight, and foaming
Susurrus of the seas.

Music that drifts like perfume,
And touches like a hand;
Dreams and stars and the ocean,
And we alone on the sand.

Glimmers and vague reflections,
And the white swirl of the foam;
Pale on the purple a vessel,
And a light that beckons home.

And I seem to see the music,
On a moonbeam bar that floats,
For the music is moonlight magic,
And the flies are its golden notes.

And I seem to hear one singing
Of a brown old coast and sea,
Of lives that were filled with passion,
And old-world tragedy.

And I hear the harsh reef’s calling
For a noble ship at sea,
And the winds of the ocean singing
A dirge for the dead to be.

Till it seems that I am the pilot,
And you are the mermaidén,
Who lures him on to the wrecking
And into her arms again.

_Song_

Over the hills where the winds are waking
All is lone as the soul of me;
Over the hills where the stars are shaking,
Breton hills by the sea.

These were with me to tell me often
How she pined in her Croisic home,
Winds that sing and the stars that soften
Over the miles of foam.

Fishers’ nets and the sailor faces;
Sad salt marshes and granite piers;
Brown, loud coast where the long foam races--
And a parting full of tears.

A gray sail’s ghost where the autumn lies on
Wraiths of the mist and the squall-blown rain;
Her dark girl eyes that search the horizon,
Grave with a haunting pain.

Stars may burn and the wild winds whistle
Over the rocks where the sea-gulls rave--
My heart is bleak as the wind-worn thistle
on her seaside grave.

IV

Sad as sad eyes that ache with tears
The stars of night shine through the leaves;
And shadowy as the Fates’ dim shears
The weft that twilight weaves.

The summer sunset marched long hosts
Of gold adown one golden peak,
That flamed and fell; and now gray ghosts
Of mist the far west streak.

They seem the shades of things that weep,
Wan things the heavens would conceal;
Blood-stained; that bear within them, deep,
Red wounds that will not heal.

Night comes, and with it storm, that slips
Wild angles of the jagged light:--
I feel the wild rain on my lips,--
A wild girl is the Night.

A moaning tremor sweeps the trees;
And all the stars are packed with death:--
She holds me by the neck and knees,
I feel her wild, wet breath.

Hell and its hags drive on the rain:--
Night holds me by the hair and pleads;
Her kisses fall like blows again;
My brow is dewed with beads.

The thunder plants wild beacons on
Each volleying height.--My soul seems blown
Far out to sea. The world is gone,
And night and I alone.

Tampa, Florida, February, 1893.

WAR-TIME SILHOUETTES.

I

THE BATTLE

The night had passed. The day had come,
Bright-born, into a cloudless sky:
We heard the rolling of the drum,
And saw the war-flags fly.

And noon had crowded upon morn
Ere Conflict shook her red locks far,
And blew her brazen battle-horn
Upon the hills of War.

Noon darkened into dusk--one blot
Of nightmare lit with hell-born suns;--
We heard the scream of shell and shot
And booming of the guns.

On batteries of belching grape
We saw the thundering cavalry
Hurl headlong,--iron shape on shape,--
With shout and bugle-cry.

When dusk had moaned and died, and night
Came on, wind-swept and wild with rain,
We slept, ’mid many a bivouac light,
And vast fields heaped with slain.

II

IN HOSPITAL

Wounded to death he lay and dreamed
The drums of battle beat afar,
And round the roaring trenches screamed
The hell of war.

Then woke; and, weeping, spoke one word
To the kind nurse who bent above;
Then in the whitewashed ward was heard
A song of love.

The song _she_ sang him when she gave
The portrait that he kissed; then sighed,
“Lay it beside me in the grave!”
And smiled and died.

III

THE SOLDIER’S RETURN

A brown wing beat the apple leaves and shook
Some blossoms on her hair. Then, note on note,
The bird’s wild music bubbled. In her book,
Her old romance, she seemed to read. No look
Betrayed the tumult in her trembling throat.

The thrush sang on. A dreamy wind came down
From one white cloud of afternoon and fanned
The dropping petals on her book and gown,
And touched her hair, whose braids of quiet brown
Gently she smoothed with one white jeweled hand.

Then, with her soul, it seemed, from feet to brow
She felt him coming: ’t was his heart, his breath
That stirred the blossom on the apple bough;
His step the wood-thrush warbled to. And now
Her cheek went crimson, now as white as death.

Then on the dappled page his shadow--yes,
Not unexpected, yet her haste assumed
Fright’s startle; and low laughter did confess
His presence there, soft with his soul’s caress
And happy manhood, where the rambo bloomed.

Quickly she rose and all her gladness sent
Wild welcome to him. Her his unhurt arm
Drew unresisted; and the soldier leant
Fond lips to hers. She wept. And so they went
Deep in the orchard towards the old brick farm.

IV

THE APPARITION

A day of drought, foreboding rain and wind,
As if stern heaven, feeling earth had sinned,
Frowned all its hatred. When the evening came,
Along the west, from bank on bank unthinned
Of clouds, the storm unfurled its oriflamme.

Then lightning signaled, and the thunder woke
Its monster drums, and all God’s torrents broke.--
She saw the wild night when the dark pane flashed;
Heard, where she stood, the disemboweled oak
Roar into fragments when the welkin crashed.

Long had she waited for a word. And, lo!
Anticipation still would not say “No:”
He has not written; he will come to her;
At dawn!--to-night!--Her heart hath told her so;
And so expectancy and love aver.

She seems to hear his fingers on the pane--
The glass is blurred, she can not see for rain:
Is _that_ his horse?--the wind is never still:
And _that_ his cloak?--ah, surely that is plain!--
A torn vine tossing at the window-sill.

She hurries forth to meet him; pale and wet,
She sees his face; the war-soiled epaulet;
A sabre-scar that bleeds from brow to cheek;
And now he smiles, and now their lips have met,
And now ... Dear heart, he fell at Cedar Creek!

V

WOUNDED

It was in August that they brought her news
Of his bad wounds; the leg that he must lose.
And August passed, and when October raised
Red rebel standards on the hills that blazed,
They brought a haggard wreck; she scarce knew whose,
Until they told her, standing stunned and dazed.

A shattered shadow of the stalwart lad,
The five-months husband, whom his country had
Enlisted, strong for war; returning this,
Whose broken countenance she feared to kiss,
While health’s remembrance stood beside him sad,
And grieved for that which was no longer his.

They brought him on a litter; and the day
Was bright and beautiful. It seemed that May
In woodland rambles had forgot her path
Of season, and, disrobing for a bath,
By the autumnal waters of some bay,
With her white nakedness had conquered Wrath.

Far otherwise she wished it: wind and rain;
The sky, one gray commiserative pain;
Sleet, and the stormy drift of frantic leaves;
To match the misery that each perceives
Aches in her hand-clutched bosom, and is plain
In eyes and mouth and all her form that grieves.

Theirs, a mute meeting of the lips; she stooped
And kissed him once: one long, dark side-lock drooped
And brushed against the bandage of his breast;
With feeble hands he held it and caressed;
Then all his happiness in one look grouped,
Saying, “Now I am home, I crave but rest.”

Once it was love! but then the battle killed
All that sweet nonsense of his youth, and filled
His heart with sterner passion.--Ah, well! peace
Must balm its pain with patience; whose surcease
Means reconcilement; e’en as God hath willed,
With war or peace who shapes His ends at ease.--

What else for these but, where their mortal lot
Of weak existence drags rent ends, to knot
The frail unravel up!--while love (afraid
Time will increase the burthen on it laid),
Seeks consolation, that consoleth not,
In toil and prayer, waiting what none evade.

VI

THE MESSAGE

Long shadows toward the east: and in the west
A blaze of garnet sunset, wherein rolled
One cloud like some great gnarly log of gold;
Each gabled casement of the farm seemed dressed
In ghosts of roses blossoming manifest.

And she had brought his letter there to read,
There on the porch, that faced the locust glade;
To watch the summer sunset burn and fade,
And breathe the twilight scent of wood and weed,
Forget all care and her soul’s hunger feed.

And on his face her fancy mused a while:
“Dark hair, dark eyes.--And now he has a beard
Dark as his hair.”--She smiled; yet almost feared
It changed him so she could not reconcile
Her heart to that which hid his lips and smile.