Chapter IX

A ghostly gold burns slowly through
The chasm’d clouds; and blended
With rainy rose and rainy blue,
The heavens, pearled with many a hue,
Die like a dolphin splendid....
High-buoyed in wrack, now one or two
Slight stars peep out--the pirate clue
To night’s rich hoard.--In dusk and dew
Here is our pathway ended.

THE OLD FARM

Dormered and verandaed, cool,
Locust-girdled on the hill,
Stained with weather-wear; at Yule
And Midsummer every sill
Thresholding the beautiful,

Still I see it standing there,
Brown above the woodland deep,
Wrapped in lights of lavender,
And slow shadows, rocked asleep
By the warm wind everywhere.

I remember how the spring,
Liberal-lapped, bewildered its
Acred orchards, murmuring,
With the blossoms’ budded bits,
Where the wood-thrush came to sing.

Barefoot Spring, at first who trod,
Like a beggarmaid, adown
The wet woodland, where the god,
With the bright sun for a crown
And the firmament for rod,

Met her; clothed her; wedded her;
Her Cophetua: when, lo!
All the hill, one breathing blur,
Burst in blossom, gleam and glow,
Peach and pearl and lavender.

Seckel, blackheart, palpitant,
Rained their bleaching strays; and white
Snowed the damson, bent aslant;
Rambow-tree and romanite
Seemed beneath deep drifts to pant.

And it stood there, brown and gray,
In the bee-boom and the bloom,
In the shadow and the ray,
In the passion and perfume,
Grave as age among the gay.

Sweet with laughter romped the clear
Boyish voices round its walls;
Rare wild-roses were the dear
Girlish faces in its halls,
Music-haunted all the year.

Far before it meadows full
Of green pennyroyal sank;
Clover-dotted as with wool
Here and there; and now a bank
Of wild color: and the cool

Dark blue shadows undefined
Of the clouds rolled overhead;
Clouds, from which the summer wind
Blew with rain, and freshly shed
Dew upon the flowerkind.

Where, through mint and gypsy-lily,
Runs the rocky brook away,
Musical among the hilly
Solitudes,--its flashing spray
Sunbeam-dashed or shadow-stilly,--

Buried in thick sassafras,
Memory follows up the hill
Still some cowbell’s mellow brass,
Where the ruined water-mill
Looms, half-hid in cane and grass.

Ah, the old farm! is it set
On the hilltop still? ’mid musk
Of the meads? where, violet,
Deepens all the dreaming dusk,
And the locust trees hang wet?

While the sunset, far and low,
On its westward windows dashes
Primrose or pomegranate glow?
And above, in lilac splashes,
Faint, first stars the heavens sow?

Sleeps it still among its roses,
Yellow roses? while the choir
Of the lonesome insects dozes?
And the white moon, filled with fire,
O’er its mossy roof reposes--
Sleeps it still among its roses?

TO SUMMER

I

Thou sit’st among the sunny silences
Of terraced hills and woodland galleries,
Thou utterance of all calm melodies,
Thou lutanist of Earth’s most fecund lute,--
Where no false note intrudes
To mar the silent music,--branch and root,
Playing the fields ripe, orchards and deep woods,
To song similitudes
Of flower and seed and fruit.

II

Oft have I felt thee, in some sensuous air,
Bewitch the wide wheat-acres everywhere
To imitated gold of thy rich hair:
The peach, by thy red lips’ delicious trouble,
Blown into gradual dyes
Of crimson, have I seen: have watched thee double--
With interluded music of thine eyes--
The grapes’ rotundities,
Bubble by purple bubble.

III

Deliberate uttered into life intense,
Out of thy song’s melodious eloquence
Beauty evolves its just preëminence:
The lily, from some pensive-smitten chord
Drawing significance
Of purity, a visible hush stands: starred
With splendor, from thy passionate utterance,
The rose tells its romance
In blushing word on word.

IV

As star by star day harps in evening,
The inspiration of all things that sing
Is in thy hands and from their touch takes wing:
All brooks, all birds,--whom song can never sate,--
Even the wind and rain,
And frogs and insects, singing soon and late,
Thy sympathies inspire, thy heart’s refrain,
Whose sounds invigorate
With rest life’s weary brain.

V

And as the night, like some mysterious rune,
Its beauty makes emphatic with the moon,
Thou lutest us no immaterial tune:
But where dim whispers haunt the cane and corn,
By thy still strain made strong,
Earth’s awful avatar,--in whom is born
Thy own deep music,--labors all night long
With growth, assuring morn
Assumes like onward song.

A GRAY DAY

I

Long volleys of wind and of rain,
And the rain on the drizzled pane,
And the day ends chill and murk;
But on yesterday’s eve, I trow,
The new-moon’s thorn-thin bow
Stabbed rosy through gold and through glow,
Like a rich, barbaric dirk.

II

The throats of the snapdragons,--
Cool-colored with gold like the dawns
That come with spring o’er the hills,--
Are filled with a sweet rain, fine,
Of starry, scintillant shine,
A faery vat of thin wine,
That the rain for the elfins fills.

III

Dabbled the poppies shrink,
And the coxcomb and the pink;
And the candytuft’s damp crown
Droops, dribbled, low bowed i’ the wet;
And rows of the mignonette
Little musk-sacks open set,
Which the weight o’ the dew drags down.

IV

Stretched taunt ’twixt the blades of grass,
A gossamer-fibered glass,
That the garden-spider spun,
The web, where the round rain clings
In the sag o’ its middle, swings--
A hammock for elfin things
When the stars succeed the sun.

V

And, mark, where the pale gourd grows
As high as the climbing rose,
How the tiger-moth is pressed
To that wide leaf’s under side.--
And I know where the red wasps hide,
And the brown bees,--that defied
The first strong gusts,--distressed.

VI

Yet I feel that the gray will blow
Aside for an afterglow;
And the wind, on a sudden, toss
Drenched boughs; a pattering shower
Athwart the red dusk in a glower,
Big drops heard hard on each flower,
The grass and the flowering moss.