III
And for a while it moves me to lie down
Here on the spot his god-head sanctified:
Mayhap some dream he dreamed may lingert brown
And young as joy, around the forestside;
Some dream within whose heart lives no disdain
For such as I whose love is sweet and sane;
That may repeat, so none but I may hear—
As one might tell a pearl-strung rosary—
Some epic that the trees have learned
to croon,
Some lyric whispered in the wild-flower’s ear,
Whose murmurous lines are sung by bird
and bee,
And all the insects of the night and noon.
IV
For, all around me, upon field and hill,
Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes;
As if the music of a god’s good-will
Had taken on material attributes
In blooms, like chords; and in the water-gleam,
That runs its silvery scales from stream to stream;
In sunbeam bars, up which the butterfly,
A golden note, vibrates then flutters
on—
Inaudible tunes, blown on the pipes of
Pan,
That have assumed a visible entity,
And drugged the air with beauty so, a
Faun,
Behold, I seem, and am no more a man.
The Rain-Crow
I
Can freckled August,—drowsing warm and
blonde
Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped
mead,
In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,—
O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy
heed
To thee? when no plumed weed, no feather’d
seed
Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,
That gleams like flint between its rim
of grasses,
Through which the dragonfly forever passes
Like
splintered diamond.
II
Drouth weights the trees, and from the farmhouse eaves
The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day,
Throbs; and the lane, that shambles under leaves
Limp with the heat—a league
of rutty way—
Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of
hay
Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves—
Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of
rain,
In thirsty heaven or on burning plain,
That
thy keen eye perceives?
III
But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.
For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting,
When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,
Great water-carrier winds their buckets
bring
Brimming with freshness. How their
dippers ring
And flash and rumble! lavishing dark dew
On corn and forestland, that, streaming
wet,
Their hilly backs against the downpour
set,
Like
giants vague in view.