THE
MEADOW
Here when
the cloudless April days begin,
And the quaint crows flock thicker
day by day,
Filling the forests with a pleasant din,
And the soiled snow creeps secretly
away,
Comes the small busy sparrow, primed with glee,
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First preacher in the naked wilderness,
Piping an end to all the long
distress
From every fence and every leafless tree.
Now with
soft slight and viewless artifice
Winter’s iron work is wondrously
undone;
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In all the little hollows cored with ice
The clear brown pools stand
simmering in the sun,
Frail lucid worlds, upon whose tremulous floors
All day the wandering water-bugs
at will,
Shy mariners whose oars are
never still,
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Voyage and dream about the heightening shores.
The bluebird,
peeping from the gnarled thorn,
Prattles upon his frolic flute,
or flings,
In bounding flight across the golden morn,
An azure gleam from off his
splendid wings.
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Here the slim-pinioned swallows sweep and pass
Down to the far-off river; the
black crow
With wise and wary visage to
and fro
Settles and stalks about the withered grass.
Here, when
the murmurous May-day is half gone,
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The watchful lark before my
feet takes flight,
And wheeling to some lonelier field far on,
Drops with obstreperous cry;
and here at night,
When the first star precedes the great red moon,
The shore-lark tinkles from
the darkening field,
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Somewhere, we know not, in the
dusk concealed,
His little creakling and continuous tune.
Here, too,
the robins, lusty as of old,
Hunt the waste grass for forage,
or prolong
From every quarter of these fields the bold,
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Blithe phrases of their never-finished
song.
The white-throat’s distant descant with slow stress
Note after note upon the noonday
falls,
Filling the leisured air at
intervals
With his own mood of piercing pensiveness.
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How often
from this windy upland perch,
Mine eyes have seen the forest
break in bloom,
The rose-red maple and the golden birch,
The dusty yellow of the elms,
the gloom
Of the tall poplar hung with tasseled black;
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Ah, I have watched, till eye
and ear and brain
Grew full of dreams as they,
the moted plain,
The sun-steeped wood, the marsh-land at its back,
The valley
where the river wheels and fills,
Yon city glimmering in its smoky
shroud,
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And out at the last misty rim the hills
Blue and far off and mounded
like a cloud,
And here the noisy rutted road that goes
Down the slope yonder, flanked
on either side
With the smooth-furrowed fields
flung black and wide, 55
Patched with pale water sleeping in the rows.
So as I watched
the crowded leaves expand,
The bloom break sheath, the
summer’s strength uprear,
In earth’s great mother’s heart already planned
The heaped and burgeoned plenty
of the year,
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Even as she from out her wintry cell
My spirit also sprang to life
anew,
And day by day as the spring’s
bounty grew,
Its conquering joy possessed me like a spell.
In reverie
by day and midnight dream
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I sought these upland fields
and walked apart,
Musing on Nature, till my thought did seem
To read the very secrets of
her heart;
In mooded moments earnest and sublime
I stored the themes of many
a future song,
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Whose substance should be Nature’s,
clear and strong,
Bound in a casket of majestic rhyme.
Brave bud-like
plans that never reached the fruit,
Like hers our mother’s who with
every hour,
Easily replenished from the sleepless root,
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Covers her bosom with fresh
bud and flower;
Yet I was happy as young lovers be,
Who in the season of their passion’s
birth
Deem that they have their utmost
worship’s worth,
If love be near them, just to hear and see.
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