Now gazed I where, sole upon gloom,
     As flower-bush in sun-specked crag,
     Up the spine of the double combe
     With yew-boughs heavily cloaked,
     A young apparition shone: 
     Known, yet wonderful, white
     Surpassingly; doubtfully known,
     For it struck as the birth of Light: 
     Even Day from the dark unyoked. 
     It waved like a pilgrim flag
     O’er processional penitents flown
     When of old they broke rounding yon spine: 
     O the pure wild-cherry in bloom!

     For their Eastward march to the shrine
     Of the footsore far-eyed Faith,
     Was banner so brave, so fair,
     So quick with celestial sign
     Of victorious rays over death? 
     For a conquest of coward despair; —
     Division of soul from wits,
     And these made rulers;—­full sure,
     More starlike never did shine
     To illumine the sinister field
     Where our life’s old night-bird flits. 
     I knew it:  with her, my own,
     Had hailed it pure of the pure;
     Our beacon yearly:  but strange
     When it strikes to within is the known;
     Richer than newness revealed. 
     There was needed darkness like mine. 
     Its beauty to vividness blown
     Drew the life in me forward, chased,
     From aloft on a pinnacle’s range,
     That hindward spidery line,
     The length of the ways I had paced,
     A footfarer out of the dawn,
     To Youth’s wild forest, where sprang,
     For the morning of May long gone,
     The forest’s white virgin; she
     Seen yonder; and sheltered me, sang;
     She in me, I in her; what songs
     The fawn-eared wood-hollows revive
     To pour forth their tune-footed throngs;
     Inspire to the dreaming of good
     Illimitable to come: 
     She, the white wild cherry, a tree,
     Earth-rooted, tangibly wood,
     Yet a presence throbbing alive;
     Nor she in our language dumb: 
     A spirit born of a tree;
     Because earth-rooted alive: 
     Huntress of things worth pursuit
     Of souls; in our naming, dreams. 
     And each unto other was lute,
     By fits quick as breezy gleams. 
     My quiver of aims and desires
     Had colour that she would have owned;
     And if by humaner fires
     Hued later, these held her enthroned: 
     My crescent of Earth; my blood
     At the silvery early stir;
     Hour of the thrill of the bud
     About to burst, and by her
     Directed, attuned, englobed: 
     My Goddess, the chaste, not chill;
     Choir over choir white-robed;
     White-bosomed fold within fold: 
     For so could I dream, breast-bare,
     In my time of blooming; dream still
     Through the maze, the mesh, and the wreck,
     Despite, since manhood was bold,
     The yoke of the flesh