THE
RETURN OF THE YEAR
Again the
warm bare earth, the noon
That hangs upon her healing
scars,
The midnight round, the great red moon,
The mother with her brood of
stars,
The mist-rack
and the wakening rain
5
Blown soft in many a forest
way,
The yellowing elm-trees, and again
The blood-root in its sheath
of gray.
The vesper-sparrow’s
song, the stress
Of yearning notes that gush
and stream,
10
The lyric joy, the tenderness,
And once again the dream! the
dream!
A touch of
far-off joy and power,
A something it is life to learn,
Comes back to earth, and one short hour
15
The glamours of the gods return.
This life’s
old mood and cult of care
Falls smitten by an older truth,
And the gray world wins back to her
The rapture of her vanished
youth.
20
Dead thoughts
revive, and he that heeds
Shall hear, as by a spirit led,
A song among the golden reeds:
"The gods are vanished
but not dead!"
For one short
hour, unseen yet near,
25
They haunt us, a forgotten mood,
A glory upon mead and mere,
A magic in the leafless wood.
At morning
we shall catch the glow
Of Dian’s quiver on the hill,
30
And somewhere in the glades I know
That Pan is at his piping still.
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