Chapter V

Washed of the early rains,
And rosed with ruddy stains,
The boughs and branches now make ready for
Their raiment green of leaves and musk and myrrh.--
As if to greet her pomp,
The heralds of her state,
As ’t were with many a silvery trump,
The birds are singing, singing,
And all the world’s elate,
As o’er the hills, as ’twere from Heaven’s gate,
With garments, dewy-clinging,
Comes Spring, around whose way the budded woods are ringing
With redbird and with bluebird and with thrush;
While, overhead, on happy wings is swinging
The swallow through the heaven’s azure hush:
And wren and sparrow, vireo and crow
Are busy with their nests, or high or low,
In every tree, it seems, and every bush.
The loamy odor of the turfy heat,
Breathed warm from every field and wood-retreat,
Is as if spirits passed on flowery feet:--
That indescribable
Aroma of the woods one knows so well,
Reminding one of sylvan presences,
Clad on with lichen and with moss,
That haunt and trail across
The woods’ dim dales and dells; their airy essences
Of racy nard and musk
Rapping at gummy husk
And honeyed sheath of every leaf and flower
That open to their knock, each at the appointed hour:--
And, lo!
Where’er they go,
Behold a miracle
Too beautiful to tell!--
Where late the woods were bare
The red-bud shakes its hair
Of flowering flame; the dogwood and the haw
Voluble with bees dazzle with pearl the shaw;
And the broad maple crimsons, sunset-red,
Through firmaments of forest overhead:
And of its boughs the wild-crab makes a lair,
A rosy cloud of blossoms, for the bees,
Bewildered there,
To traffic in; lulling itself with these.
And in the whispering woods
The wild-flower multitudes
Rise, star, and bell, and bugle, all amort
To everything save their own loveliness
And the soft wind’s caress,--
The wind that tip-toes through them:--liverwort,
Spring-beauty, windflower and the bleeding-heart,
And bloodroot, holding low
Its cups of stainless snow;
Sorrel and trillium and the twin-leaf, too,
Twinkling, like stars, through dew:
And patches, as it were, of saffron skies,
Ranunculus; and golden eyes
Of adder’s-tongue; and mines,
It seems, of grottoed gold, the poppy-celandines;
And, sapphire-spilled,
Bluets and violets,
Dark pansy-violets and columbines,
With rainy radiance filled;
And many more whose names my mind forgets,
But not my heart:
The Nations of the Flowers, making gay
In every place and part,
With pomp and pageantry
Of absolute Beauty, all the worlds of woods,
In congregated multitudes,
Assembled where
Unearthly colors all the oaks put on,
Velvet and silk and vair,
Vermeil and mauve and fawn,
Dim and auroral as the hues of dawn.

WIND AND CLOUD

_A March Voluntary_

I

Winds that cavern heaven and the clouds
And canyon with cerulean blue,--
Great rifts down which the stormy sunlight crowds
Like some bright seraph, who,
Mailed in intensity of silver mail,
Flashes his splendor over hill and vale,--
Now tramp, tremendous, the loud forest through:
Or now, like mighty runners in a race,
That swing, long pace to pace,
Sweep round the hills, fresh as, at dawn’s first start,
They swept, dew-dripping, from
The crystal-crimson ruby of her heart,
Shouting the dim world dumb.
And with their passage the gray and green
Of the earth’s washed clean;
And the cleansing breath of their might is wings
And warm aroma we know as Spring’s,
And sap and strength to her bourgeonings.

II

My brow I bare
To the cool, clean air,
That blows from the crests of the clouds that roll,
Pearl-piled and berged as floes of Northern Seas,
Banked gray and thunder-low
Big in the heaven’s peace;
Clouds, borne from nowhere that we know,
With nowhere for their goal;
With here and there a silvery glow
Of sunlight chasming deeps of sombre snow,
Great gulfs that overflow
With sky, a sapphire-blue,
Or opal, sapphire-kissed,
Wide-welled and deep and swiftly rifting through
Stratas of streaming mist;--
Each opening like a pool,
Serene, cerule,
Set round with crag-like clouds ’mid which its eye gleams cool.

III

What blue is bluer than the bluebird’s blue!--
’T is as if heaven itself sat on its wings;
As if the sky in miniature it bore
The fields and forests through,
Bringing the very heaven to our door;
The daybreak of its back soft-wedded to
The sunset-auburn of its throat that sings.--
The dithyrambics of the wind and rain
Strive to, but can not, drown its strain:
Again, and yet again
I hear it where the maples tassel red,
And blossoms of the crab round out o’erhead,
And catkins make the willow-brake
A gossamer blur around the lake
That lately was a stream,
A little stream locked in its icy dream.

IV

Invisible crystals of aërial ring,
Against the wind I hear the bluebird fling
Its notes; and where the oak’s mauve leaves uncurl
I catch the skyey glitter of its wing;
Its wing that lures me, like some magic charm,
Far in the woods
And shadowy solitudes:
And where the purple hills stretch under purple and pearl
Of clouds that sweep and swirl,
Its music seems to take material form;
A form that beckons with cerulean arm
And bids me see and follow,
Where, in the violet hollow,
There at the wood’s far turn,
On starry moss and fern,
She shimmers, glimmering like a rainbowed shower,
The Spirit of Spring,
Diaphanous-limbed, who stands
With honeysuckle hands
Sowing the earth with many a firstling flower,
Footed with fragrance of their blossoming,
And clad in heaven as is the bluebird’s wing.