When berries were red on her ash,
     The blackbird would rifle them rough,
     Till the ground underneath looked a gash,
     And her rogue grew the round of a chough. 
     The squirrel cocked ear o’er his hoop,
     Up the spruce, quick as eye, trailing brush. 
     She knew any tit of the troop
     All as well as the snail-tapping thrush.

     III

     I gazed:  ’twas the scene of the frame,
     With the face, the dear life for me, fled. 
     No window a lute to my name,
     No watcher there plying the thread. 
     But the blackbird hung peeking at will;
     The squirrel from cone hopped to cone;
     The thrush had a snail in his bill,
     And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone.

     Hymn to colour

     I

     With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared,
     And made them on each side a shadow seem. 
     Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared,
     Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dream
     To fall on daylight; and night puts away
     Her darker veil for grey.

     II

     In that grey veil green grassblades brushed we by;
     We came where woods breathed sharp, and overhead
     Rocks raised clear horns on a transforming sky: 
     Around, save for those shapes, with him who led
     And linked them, desert varied by no sign
     Of other life than mine.

     III

     By this the dark-winged planet, raying wide,
     From the mild pearl-glow to the rose upborne,
     Drew in his fires, less faint than far descried,
     Pure-fronted on a stronger wave of morn: 
     And those two shapes the splendour interweaved,
     Hung web-like, sank and heaved.

     IV

     Love took my hand when hidden stood the sun
     To fling his robe on shoulder-heights of snow. 
     Then said:  There lie they, Life and Death in one. 
     Whichever is, the other is:  but know,
     It is thy craving self that thou dost see,
     Not in them seeing me.

     V

     Shall man into the mystery of breath,
     From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy? 
     Or learn the secret of the shrouded death,
     By lifting up the lid of a white eye? 
     Cleave thou thy way with fathering desire
     Of fire to reach to fire.

     VI

     Look now where Colour, the soul’s bridegroom, makes
     The house of heaven splendid for the bride. 
     To him as leaps a fountain she awakes,
     In knotting arms, yet boundless:  him beside,
     She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power
     Brings heaven to the flower.

     VII

     He gives her homeliness in desert air,
     And sovereignty in spaciousness; he leads
     Through widening chambers of surprise to where
     Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes,
     Because his touch is infinite and lends
     A yonder to all ends.