Lake Lyrics and Other Poems

by William Wilfred Campbell

 

HOW SPRING CAME

(To the Lake Region.)

 
NO passionate cry came over the desolate places,
    No answering call from iron-bound land to land;
But dawns and sunsets fell on mute, dead faces,
    And noon and night, death crept from strand to strand.

’Till love breathed out across the wasted reaches,
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    And dipped in rosy dawns from desolate deeps;
And woke with mystic songs the sullen beaches,
    And flamed to life the pale, mute, death-like sleeps.

Then the warm south, with amorous breath inblowing,
    Breathed soft o’er breast of wrinkled lake and mere;
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And faces white from scorn of the north’s snowing,
    Now rosier grew to greet the kindling year.