Fit theme for song, the sylvan maid
Who, if she knew not fauns or satyrs,
Had conjured oft in mossy shade
Visions of savage pale-face haters;
I trow she dined on pork and maize
In cabin, single-roomed and sooted,
Quite innocent of frills and stays,
Warm-hearted and bare-footed.
Her beauty surely brought her note,—...
Spring came with tiny lances thrusting,
And earth was clad in peeping green;
In russet bark, the twigs incrusting,
Tenderest blossom-points were seen;
A robin courier proclaimed good cheer:
Summer will soon arrive, for I am here.
And now from cherry boughs in flower
The languid breeze arousing shakes,
With every honeyed...
Still as I move thou movest,
Sister of mine, silent and left of the light.
Why dost thou follow my way
All through the hours of the day?
Where dost thou wait all the night
For the coming of light?
Is it then that thou lovest
Me, that forever must stand between thee and the sun?
For whose sake thy life is made
The...
Last night Alicia wore a Tuscan bonnet,
And many humming-birds were fastened on it.
I sat beside Alicia at the play;
Her violet eyes with tender tears were wet
(The diamonds in her ears less bright than they)
For pity of the woes of Juliet:
Alicia’s sighs a poet might have set
To delicate music in a dainty sonnet.
Last...
One sat within a hung and lighted room—
A little shape, with face between his wings,
And in the light made of all golden things
He seemed a warm and living rose abloom;
And one without sobbed in the night and gloom,
And all about him was a pilgrim’s weed,
His little hands and cold he held for meed
Of his long waiting, sad as by a tomb:...
She wanders up and down the main
Without a master, nowhere bound;
The currents turn her round and round,
Her track is like a tangled skein;
And never helmsman by his chart
So strange a way as hers may steer
To enter port or to depart
For any harbor far or near.
The waters clamor at her sides,
The winds cry...
The flying sea-bird mocked the floating dulse:
“Poor wandering water-weed, where dost thou go,
Astray upon the ocean’s restless pulse?”
It said: “I do not know.
“At a cliff’s foot I clung and was content,
Swayed to and fro by warm and shallow waves;
Along the coast the storm-wind raging went,
And tore me from my caves.
Thanksgiving to the gods!
Shaken and shivering in the autumn rains,
With clay feet clinging to the weary sods,
I wait below the clouds, amid the plains,
As though I stood in some remote, strange clime,
Waiting to kneel upon the tomb of time.
The harvest swaths are gathered in the garth,
The aftermath is floating in the fields,...
That night I think that no one slept;
No bells were struck, no whistle blew,
And when the watch was changed I crept
From man to man of all the crew
With whispered orders. Though we swept
Through roaring seas, we hushed the clock,
And muffled every clanking block.
So when one fool, unheeding, cried
Some petty order,...
In a tangled, scented hollow,
On a bed of crimson roses,
Stilly now the wind reposes;
Hardly can the breezes borrow
Breath to stir the night-swept river.
Motionless the water-sedges,
And within the dusky hedges
Sounds no leaf’s impatient shiver.
Sleep has come, that rare rest-giver.
Light and song have flown away...
