Chapter IV

No bird is heard; no throat to whistle awake
The sleepy hush; to let its music leak
Fresh, bubble-like, through bloom-roofs of the brake:
Only the green-blue heron, famine-weak,--
Searching the stale pools of the minnowless creek,--
Utters its call; and then the rain-crow, too,
False prophet now, croaks to the stagnant air;
While overhead,--still as if painted there,--
A buzzard hangs, black on the burning blue.

THE BROKEN DROUTH

It seemed the listening forest held its breath
Before some vague and unapparent form
Of fear, approaching with the wings of death,
On the impending storm.

Above the hills, big, bellying clouds loomed, black
And ominous; yet silent as the blue
That pools calm heights of heaven, deepening back
’Twixt clouds of snowdrift hue.

Then instantly, as when a multitude
Shout riot and war through some tumultous town,
Innumerable voices swept the wood
As wild the wind rushed down.

And fierce and few, as when a strong man weeps,
Great rain-drops dashed the dust; and, overhead,
Ponderous and vast down the prodigious deeps,
Went slow the thunder’s tread.

And swift and furious, as when giants fence,
The lightning foils of tempest went insane;
Then far and near sonorous Earth grew dense
With long sweet sweep of rain.

FEUD

A mile of lane,--hedged high with ironweeds
And dying daisies,--white with sun, that leads
Downward into a wood; through which a stream
Steals like a shadow; over which is laid
A bridge of logs, worn deep with many a team,
Sunk in the tangled shade.

Far off a wood-dove lifts its lonely cry;
And in the sleepy silver of the sky
A gray hawk wheels scarce larger than a hand.--
From point to point the road grows worse and worse,
Until that place is reached where all the land
Seems burdened with some curse.

A ragged fence of pickets, warped and sprung,--
On which the fragments of a gate are hung,--
Divides a hill, the fox and ground-hog haunt,
A wilderness of briers; o’er whose tops
A battered barn is seen, low-roofed and gaunt,
’Mid fields that know no crops.

Fields over which a path, o’erwhelmed with burrs
And ragweeds, noisy with the grasshoppers,
Leads,--lost, irresolute as paths the cows
Wear through the woods,--unto a woodshed; then,
With wrecks of windows, to a huddled house,
Where men have murdered men.

A house, whose tottering chimney, clay and rock,
Is seamed and crannied; whose lame door and lock
Are bullet-bored; around which, there and here,
Are sinister stains.--One dreads to look around.--
The place seems thinking of that time of fear
And dares not breathe a sound.

Within, is emptiness: the sunlight falls
On faded journals papering its walls;
On advertisement chromos, torn with time
Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build.--
The house is dead: meseems that night of crime
It, too, was shot and killed.

UNANOINTED

I

Upon the Siren-haunted seas, between Fate’s mythic shores,
Within a world of moon and mist, where dusk and daylight wed,
I see a phantom galley and its hull is banked with oars,
With ghostly oars that move to song, a song of dreams long dead:--

“Oh, we are sick of rowing here!
With toil our arms are numb;
With smiting year on weary year
Salt-furrows of the foam:
Our journey’s end is never near,
And will no nearer come--
Beyond our reach the shores appear
Of far Elysium.”

II

Within a land of cataracts and mountains old, and sand,
Beneath whose heavens ruins rise, o’er which the stars burn red,
I see a spectral cavalcade with crucifix in hand
And shadowy armor march and sing, a song of dreams long dead:--

“Oh, we are weary marching on!
Our limbs are travel-worn;
With cross and sword from dawn to dawn
We wend with raiment torn:
The leagues to go, the leagues we’ve gone
Are sand and rock and thorn--
The way is long to Avalon
Beyond the deeps of morn.”