Chapter IV

The days approach again; the days
Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag
When in the haze by puddled ways
The gnarled thorn seems a crookéd hag.

When rotting orchards reek with rain;
And woodlands crumble, leaf and log;
And in the drizzling yard again
The gourd is tagged with points of fog.

Now let me seat my soul among
The woods’ dim dreams, and come in touch
With melancholy, sad of tongue
And sweet, who says so much, so much.

BARE BOUGHS

O heart,--that beat the bird’s blithe blood,
The blithe bird’s strain, and understood
The song it sang to leaf and bud,--
What dost thou in the wood?

O soul,--that kept the brook’s glad flow,
The glad brook’s word to sun and moon,--
What dost thou here where song lies low,
Dead as the dreams of June?

Where once was heard a voice of song,
The hautboys of the mad winds sing;
Where once a music flowed along,
The rain’s wild bugles ring.

The weedy water frets and ails,
And moans in many a sunless fall;
And, o’er the melancholy, trails
The black crow’s eldritch call.

Unhappy brook! O withered wood!
O days, whom death makes comrades of!
Where are the birds that thrilled the blood
When Life struck hands with Love?

A song, one soared against the blue;
A song, one bubbled in the leaves:
A song, one threw where orchards grew
Red-appled to the eaves.

The birds are flown; the flowers are dead;
And sky and earth are bleak and gray;
The wild winds hang i’ the boughs instead,
And wild leaves strew the way.

A THRENODY

I

The rainy smell of a ferny dell,
Whose shadow no sun-ray flaws,
When Autumn sits in the wayside weeds
Telling her beads
Of haws.

II

The phantom mist, that is moonbeam-kissed,
On hills where the trees are thinned,
When Autumn leans at the oak-root’s scarp,
Touching a harp
Of wind.

III

The cricket’s chirr ’neath brier and burr,
By leaf-strewn pools and streams,
When Autumn stands ’mid the dropping nuts,
With the book, she shuts,
Of dreams.

IV

The gray “Alas” of the days that pass,
And the hope that says “Adieu,”
A parting sorrow, a shriveled flower,
And one ghost’s hour
With you.

SNOW

The moon, like a round device
On a shadowy shield of war,
Hangs white in a heaven of ice
With a solitary star.

The wind is sunk to a sigh,
And the waters are steeled with frost;
And gray in the eastern sky
The last snow-cloud is lost.

White fields, that are winter-starved;
Black woods, that are winter-fraught;
And Earth like a face death-carved
With the iron of some black thought.

AN OLD SONG

I

It’s, Oh, for the hills, where the wind’s some one
With a vagabond foot that follows!
And a cheer-up hand that he claps upon
Your arm with the hearty words, “Come on!
We’ll soon be out of the hollows,
My heart!
We’ll soon be out of the hollows!”