WORDS, words,
Ye are like birds.
Would I might fold you,
In my hands hold you
Till ye were warm and your feathers a-flutter;
Till, in your throats,
Tremulous notes
Foretold the songs ye would utter.
Words, words,
Ye are all birds!
Would ye might linger...
Love must be a fearsome thing
That can bind a maid
Glad of life as leaves in spring,
Swift and unafraid.
I could find a heart to sing
Death and darkness, praise or blame;
But before that name,
Heedfully, oh, heedfully
Do I lock my breast;
I am silent as a tree,
Guardful of the nest...
Dumb Mother of all music, let me rest
On thy great heart while summer days pass by;
While all the heat up-quivers, let me lie
Close gathered to the fragrance of thy breast.
Let not the pipe of birds from some high nest
Give voice unto a thought of melody,
Nor dreaming clouds afloat along the sky
Meet any wind of promise from the west....
Here they give me greeting,
House me warm within,
Break their bread and share it
With the heart of kin.
Here the ruddy hearth-light
Singes not a moth,
Gives a summer welcome
As a red rose doth.
I would leave a gift here
If I might: not I!—
Like a homeless laughter,
Vagrant wind gone by.
But...
What bring ye me, O camels, across the southern desert,
The wan and parching desert, pale beneath the dusk?
Ye great slow-moving ones, faithful as care is faithful,
Uncouth as dreams may be, sluggish as far-off ships,—
What bring ye me, O camels?
“We bring thee gold like sunshine, saving that it warms not;
And rarest purple bring we, as...
I ’ll not believe the dullard dark,
Nor all the winds that weep,
But I shall find the farthest dream
That kisses me, asleep.
O Brother Planets, unto whom I cry,
Know ye, in all the worlds, a gladder thing
Than this glad life of ours, this wandering
Among the eternal winds that wander by?
Ever to fly, with white star-faces set
Quenchless against the darkness, and the wet
Pinions of all the storms,—on, on alone,
With radiant locks...
I Saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,
Until the music called, and called me thence,
And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come
To lonely children straying far from home,
Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.
If I might follow far and far away
Unto the country where these songs abide,
I think my soul would...
O Far-off rose of long ago,
An hour of sweet, an hour of red,
To live, to breathe, and then to go
Into the dark ere June was dead!
Why say they: Roses shall return
With every year as years go on?
New springtime and strange bloom, my rose,
And alien June; but thou art gone.
