No bone had he to bind him,
His speech was like the push
Of numerous humming-birds at once
From a superior bush.
His countenance a billow,
His fingers, if he pass,
Let go a music, as of tunes
Blown tremulous in glass.
He visited, still flitting;
Then, like a timid man,
Again he tapped—’t was flurriedly—
And I became alone.
XXX I
NATURE rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,—
Prodigal of blue,
Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
XXXII
THE leaves, like women, interchange
Sagacious confidence;
Somewhat of nods, and somewhat of
Portentous inference,
The parties in both cases
Enjoining secrecy,—
Inviolable compact
To notoriety.
XXXIII
How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies
100
never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.
XXXIV
IT sounded as if the streets were running,
And then the streets stood still.
Eclipse was all we could see at the window,
And awe was all we could feel.
By and by the boldest stole out of his covert,
To see if time was there.
Nature was in her beryl
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apron,
Mixing fresher air.
XXXV
THE rat is the concisest tenant.
He pays no rent,—
Repudiates the obligation,
On schemes intent.
Balking our wit
To sound or circumvent,
Hate cannot harm
A foe so reticent.
Neither decree
Prohibits him,
Lawful as
Equilibrium.
XXXVI
FREQUENTLY the woods are pink,
Frequently are brown;
Frequently the hills undress
Behind my native town.
Oft a head is crested
I was wont to see,
And as oft a cranny
Where it used to be.
And the earth, they tell me,
On its axis turned,—
Wonderful rotation
By but twelve performed!
XXXVII
THE wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.
The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.
The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands
That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.
XXXVIII
SOUTH winds jostle them,
Bumblebees come,
Hover, hesitate,
Drink, and are gone.
Butterflies pause
On their passage Cashmere;
I, softly plucking,
Present them here!
XXXIX
BRING me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons
102
up,
And say how many dew;
Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!
Write me how many notes there be
In the new robin’s ecstasy
Among astonished boughs;
How many trips the tortoise makes,
How many cups the bee partakes,—
The debauchee of dews!
Also, who laid the rainbow’s piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite,
Who counts the wampum
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of the night,
To see that none is due?
Who built this little Alban house
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who’ll let me out some gala day,
With implements to fly away,
Passing pomposity?
XL
SHE sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!
You dropped a purple ravelling
104
in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you’ve littered all the East
With duds of emerald!
And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars—
And then I come away.
XLI
LIKE mighty footlights burned the red
At bases of the trees,—
The far theatricals of day
Exhibiting to these.
’T was universe that did applaud
While, chiefest of the crowd,
Enabled by his royal dress,
Myself distinguished God.
XLII
WHERE ships of purple gently toss
On seas of daffodil,
Fantastic sailors mingle,
And then—the wharf is still.
XLIII
BLAZING in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face, to die;
Stooping as low as the kitchen window,
Touching the roof and tinting the barn,
Kissing her bonnet to the meadow,—
And the juggler of day is gone!
XLIV
FARTHER in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.
No ordinance
105
is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.
Antiquest
106
felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticley
107
Repose to typify.
Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic
108
difference
Enhances nature now.
XLV
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
XLVI
IT can’t be summer,—that got through;
It’s early yet for spring;
There’s that long town of white to cross
Before the blackbirds sing.
It can’t be dyings—it’s too rouge,—
The dead shall go in white.
So sunset shuts my question down
With clasps of chrysolite.
109
XLVII
THE gentian
110
weaves her fringes,
The maple’s loom is red.
My departing blossoms
Obviate parade.
A brief, but patient illness,
An hour to prepare;
And one, below this morning,
Is where the angels are.
It was a short procession,—
The bobolink was there,
An aged bee addressed us,
And then we knelt in prayer.
We trust that she was willing,—
We ask that we may be.
Summer, sister, seraph,
Let us go with thee!
In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen!
XLVIII
GOD made a little gentian;
It tried to be a rose
And failed, and all the summer laughed.
But just before the snows
There came a purple creature
That ravished all the hill;
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition;
The Tyrian
111
would not come
Until the North evoked it.
“Creator! shall I bloom?”
XLIX
BESIDES the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eves,—
Gone Mr. Bryant’s golden-rod,
112
And Mr. Thomson‘s
113
sheaves.
Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.
Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!
L
IT sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.
It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain,—
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.
It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil
On stump and stack and stem,—
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.
It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen,—
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.
LI
No brigadier throughout the year
So civic as the Jay.
A neighbor and a warrior too,
With shrill felicity
Pursuing winds that censure us
A February day,
The brother of the universe
Was never blown away.
The snow and he are intimate;
I’ve often seen them play
When heaven looked upon us all
With such severity,
I felt apology were due
To an insulted sky,
Whose pompous frown was nutriment
To their temerity.
The pillow of this daring head
Is pungent evergreens;
His larder—terse and militant—
Unknown, refreshing things;
His character a tonic,
His future a dispute;
Unfair an immortality
That leaves this neighbor out.
LII
NEW feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude.
New children play upon the green,
New weary sleep below;
And still the pensive spring returns,
And still the punctual snow!
LIII
PINK, small, and punctual.
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May,
Dear to the moss,
Known by the knoll,
Next to the robin
In every human soul.
Bold little beauty,
Bedecked with thee,
Nature forswears
Antiquity.
(With the first Arbutus.)
114
LIV
THE murmur of a bee
A witchcraft yieldeth me.
If any ask me why,
’T were easier to die
Than tell.
The red upon the hill
Taketh away my will;
If anybody sneer,
Take care, for God is here,
That’s all.
The breaking of the day
Addeth to my degree;
If any ask me how,
Artist, who drew me so,
Must tell!
LV
PERHAPS you’d like to buy a flower?
But I could never sell.
If you would like to borrow
Until the daffodil
Unties her yellow bonnet
Beneath the village door,
Until the bees, from clover rows
Their hock
115
and sherry draw,
Why, I will lend until just then,
But not an hour more!
LVI
THE pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
LVII
SOME keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.
Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;
116
I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton
117
sings.
God preaches,—a noted clergyman,—
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I’m going all along!
LVIII
THE bee is not afraid of me,
I know the butterfly;
The pretty people in the woods
Receive me cordially.
The brooks laugh louder when I come,
The breezes madder play.
Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists?
Wherefore, O summer’s day?
LIX
SOME rainbow coming from the fair!
Some vision of the World Cashmere
I confidently see!
Or else a peacock’s purple train,
Feather by feather, on the plain
Fritters itself away!
The dreamy butterflies bestir,
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year’s sundered tune.
From some old fortress on the sun
Baronial bees march, one by one,
In murmuring platoon!
The robins stand as thick to-day
As flakes of snow stood yesterday,
On fence and roof and twig.
The orchis
118
binds her feather on
For her old lover, Don
119
the Sun,
Revisiting the bog!
Without commander, countless, still,
The regiment of wood and hill
In bright detachment stand.
Behold! Whose multitudes are these?
The children of whose turbaned seas,
Or what Circassian
120
land?
LX
THE grass so little has to do,—
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain,