STORM
Out of the
grey northwest, where many a day gone by
Ye tugged and howled in your
tempestuous grot,
And evermore the huge frost giants lie,
Your wizard guards in vigilance
unforgot,
Out of the grey northwest, for now the bonds are riven,
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On wide wings your thongless flight is driven,
That lulls but resteth not.
And all the
grey day long, and all the dense wild night
Ye wheel and hurry with the
sheeted snow,
By cedared waste and many a pine-dark height,
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Across white rivers frozen fast
below;
Over the lonely forests, where the flowers yet sleeping
Turn in their narrow beds with dreams of weeping
In some remembered woe;
Across the
unfenced wide marsh levels, where the dry
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Brown ferns sigh out, and last
year’s sedges scold
In some drear language, rustling haggardly
Their thin dead leaves and dusky
hoods of gold;
Across grey beechwoods where the pallid leaves unfalling
In the blind gusts like homeless ghosts are calling
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With voices cracked and old;
Across the
solitary clearings, where the low
Fierce gusts howl through the
blinded woods, and round
The buried shanties all day long the snow
Sifts and piles up in many a
spectral mound;
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Across lone villages in eery wilderness
Whose hidden life no living shape confesses
Nor any human sound;
Across the
serried masses of dim cities, blown
Full of the snow that ever shifts
and swells,
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While far above them all their towers of stone
Stand and beat back your fierce
and tyrannous spells,
And hour by hour send out, like voices torn and broken
Of battling giants that have grandly spoken,
The veering sound of bells;
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So day and
night, oh wind, with hiss and moan you fleet,
Where once long gone on many
a green-leafed day
Your gentler brethren wandered with light feet
And sang with voices soft and
sweet as they,
The same blind thought that you with wilder might are
speaking,
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Seeking the same strange thing that you are seeking
In this your stormier way.
Oh wind,
wild-voicèd brother, in your northern cave,
My spirit also being so beset
With pride and pain, I heard you beat and rave,
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Grinding your chains with furious
howl and fret,
Knowing full well that all earth’s moving things inherit
The same chained might and madness of the spirit,
That none may quite forget.
You in your
cave of snows, we in our narrow girth
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Of need and sense, forever chafe
and pine;
Only in moods of some demonic birth
Our souls take fire, our flashing
wings untwine;
Even like you, mad wind, above our broken prison,
With streaming hair and maddened eyes uprisen,
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We dream ourselves divine;
Mad moods
that come and go in some mysterious way,
That flash and fall, none knoweth
how or why,
Oh wind, our brother, they are yours to-day,
The stormy joy, the sweeping
mastery;
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Deep in our narrow cells, we hear you, we awaken,
With hands afret and bosoms strangely shaken,
We answer to your cry.
I most that
love you, wind, when you are fierce and free,
In these dull fetters cannot
long remain;
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Lo, I will rise and break my thongs and flee
Forth to your drift and beating,
till my brain
Even for an hour grow wild in your divine embraces,
And then creep back into mine earthly traces,
And bind me with my chain.
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Nay, wind,
I hear you, desperate brother, in your might
Whistle and howl; I shall not
tarry long,
And though the day be blind and fierce, the night
Be dense and wild, I still am
glad and strong
To meet you face to face; through all your gust and
drifting
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With brow held high, my joyous hands uplifting,
I cry you song for song.
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