Lake Lyrics and Other Poems

by William Wilfred Campbell

 

TO THE BLACKBERRY

 
I FIND thee by the country side,
    With angry mailèd thorn;
When first with dreamy woods and skies
    The summer time is born.

By every fence and woodland path
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    Thy milk-white blossom blows;
In lonely haunts of mist and dream,
    The summer airs enclose.

And when the freighted August days
    Far into Autumn lean;
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Sweet, luscious, on the laden branch,
    Thy ripened fruit is seen.

Dark gypsy of the glowing year,
    Child of the sun and rain,
While dreaming by thy tangled path,
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    There comes to me again,

The memory of a happy boy,
    Barefooted, freed from school,
Who plucked your rich lip-staining fruit,
    By road-ways green and cool.
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And tossed in glee his ragged cap,
    With laughter to the sky;
Oblivious in the glow of youth,
    How the mad world went by;

Nor cared in realms of summer time,
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    By haunts of bough and vine,
If Nicholas lost the Volga,
    Or Bismark held the Rhine,

O time when shade with sun was blent,
    So like an April shower;
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Life has its flower and thorn and fruit,
    But thou wert all its flower.

When every day Nepenthe lent,
    To drown its deepest sorrow,
And evening skies but prophesied
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    A glorious skied to-morrow.

O, long gone days of sunlit youth,
    I’d live through years of pain,
Once more life’s fate of thorn and fruit
    To dream your flower again.
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