Pageant of man’s poetic brain,
     His grand procession of the song,
     It was; the Muses and their train;
     Their God to lead the glittering throng: 
     At whiles a beat of forest gong;
     At whiles a glimpse of Python slain. 
     Mostly divinest harmony,
     The lyre, the dance.  We could believe
     A life in orb and brook and tree,
     And cloud; and still holds Memory
     A morning in the eyes of eve.

     The thrush in February

     I know him, February’s thrush,
     And loud at eve he valentines
     On sprays that paw the naked bush
     Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

     Now ere the foreign singer thrills
     Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours,
     A herald of the million bills;
     And heed him not, the loss is yours.

     My study, flanked with ivied fir
     And budded beech with dry leaves curled,
     Perched over yew and juniper,
     He neighbours, piping to his world:-

     The wooded pathways dank on brown,
     The branches on grey cloud a web,
     The long green roller of the down,
     An image of the deluge-ebb:-

     And farther, they may hear along
     The stream beneath the poplar row. 
     By fits, like welling rocks, the song
     Spouts of a blushful Spring in flow.

     But most he loves to front the vale
     When waves of warm South-western rains
     Have left our heavens clear in pale,
     With faintest beck of moist red veins: 

     Vermilion wings, by distance held
     To pause aflight while fleeting swift: 
     And high aloft the pearl inshelled
     Her lucid glow in glow will lift;

     A little south of coloured sky;
     Directing, gravely amorous,
     The human of a tender eye
     Through pure celestial on us: 

     Remote, not alien; still, not cold;
     Unraying yet, more pearl than star;
     She seems a while the vale to hold
     In trance, and homelier makes the far.

     Then Earth her sweet unscented breathes,
     An orb of lustre quits the height;
     And like blue iris-flags, in wreaths
     The sky takes darkness, long ere quite.

     His Island voice then shall you hear,
     Nor ever after separate
     From such a twilight of the year
     Advancing to the vernal gate.

     He sings me, out of Winter’s throat,
     The young time with the life ahead;
     And my young time his leaping note
     Recalls to spirit-mirth from dead.

     Imbedded in a land of greed,
     Of mammon-quakings dire as Earth’s,
     My care was but to soothe my need;
     At peace among the littleworths.

     To light and song my yearning aimed;
     To that deep breast of song and light
     Which men have barrenest proclaimed;
     As ’tis to senses pricked with fright.