Chapter VII

Now while the dingles and the vine-roofed glens
Whisper their flowery tale
Unto the silence; and the lakes and fens
Unto the moonlight pale
Murmur their rapture, let us seek her out,
Her of the honey throat and peach-sweet pout,
Summer! and at her feet,
The love of old
Lay like a sheaf of wheat,
And of our hearts the purest gold of gold.

INDIAN SUMMER

The dawn is a warp of fever,
The eve is a woof of fire;
And the month is a singing weaver
Weaving a red desire.

With stars Dawn dices with Even
For the rosy gold they heap
On the blue of the day’s broad heaven,
On the black of the night’s wide deep.

It’s--“Reins to the blood!” and “Marry!”
The Season’s a prince who burns
With the teasing lusts that harry
His heart for a wench who spurns.

It’s--“Crown us a beaker with sherry,
To drink to the doxy’s heels;
A tankard of wine o’ the berry,
To lips like a cloven peel’s.

“’S death! if a king be saddened,
Right so let a fool laugh lies:
But wine! when a king is gladdened,
And a woman’s waist and her eyes.”

He hath shattered the loom of the weaver,
And left but a leaf that flits,
He hath seized heaven’s gold, and a fever
Of mist and of frost is its.

He hath tippled the buxom beauty,
And gotten her hug and her kiss--
The wide world’s royal booty
To pile at her feet for this.

TO SORROW

I

O dark-eyed spirit of the marble brow,
Whose look is silence and whose touch is night,
Who walkest lonely through the world, O thou,
Who sittest lonely with Life’s blown-out light;
Who in the hollow hours of night’s noon
Criest like some lost child;
Whose anguish-fevered eyeballs seek the moon
To cool their pulses wild.
Thou who dost bend to kiss Joy’s sister cheek,
Turning its rose to alabaster; yea,
Thou who art terrible and mad and meek,
Why in my heart art thou enshrined to-day?
Sorrow, O say! O say!

II

Now Spring is here and all the world is white,
I will go forth, and where the forest robes
Itself in green, and every hill and height
Crowns its fair head with blossoms,--spirit globes
Of hyacinth and crocus dashed with dew,--
I will forget my grief,
And thee, O Sorrow, gazing at the blue,
Beneath a last year’s leaf,
Of some brief violet the south-wind woos,
Or bluet, whence the west-wind raked the snow;
The baby eyes of love, the darling hues
Of happiness, that thou canst never know,
Mother of pain and woe.

III

On some hoar upland, hoar with clustered thorns,
Hard by a river’s windy white of waves,
I shall sit down with Spring,--whose eyes are morns
Of light; whose cheeks the rose of health enslaves,--
And so forget thee, braiding in Spring’s hair
The snowdrop, tipped with green,
The cool-eyed primrose and the trillium fair,
And moony celandine.
Contented so to lie within her arms,
Forgetting all the sere and sad and wan,
Remembering Love alone, who, o’er earth’s storms,
High on the mountains of perpetual dawn,
Leads the glad Hours on.