Sad summers arms grow cold; his fire is falling;His feet draw back to give the stern one way.It is the voice and shadow of the slayer,Slayer of loves, sweet world, slayer of dreams;Make sad thy voice with sombre plaint and prayer;Make gray thy woods, and darken all they streams.Black grows the river, blacker drifts the…
Where the first plough upturned the clinging sods,Or the lost shepherd strayed,Often to the tired listener’s earThere came at noonday or beneath the starsA sound, he knew not whence, so sweet and clear,That all his aches and scarsAnd every brooded bitterness,Fallen asunder from his soul took flight,Like mist or darkness yielding to the pressOf an…
Filling the forests with a pleasant din,And the soiled snow creeps secretly away,Comes the small busy sparrow, primed with glee,First preacher in the naked wilderness,Piping an end to all the long distressFrom every fence and every leafless tree.Now with soft slight and viewless artificeWinter’s iron work is wondrously undone;In all the little hollows cored with…
In the hush where the ghosts of the dead flowers play;The sleep that is sweet of her slumbering spaceLet not a sight or a sound eraseOf the woe that hath fallen on all the lands:Gather, ye dreams, to her sunny face,Shadow her head with your golden hands.The woods that are golden and red for a…
April kisses thee good-bye;Thou must haste and follow too;Silent friend that guarded wellWithered things to make us glad,Shyest friend that could not tellHalf the kindly thought he had.Haste thee, speed thee, O kind snow;Down the dripping valleys go,From the fields and gleaming meadows,Where the slaying hours behold thee,From the forests whose slim shadows,Brown and leafless…
The wind dies out along the height,And denser still the snow,A gathering weight on roof and tree,Falls down scarce audibly.The road before me smooths and fillsApace, and all aboutThe fences dwindle, and the hillsAre blotted slowly out;The naked trees loom spectrallyInto the dim white sky.The meadows and far-sheeted streamsLie still without a sound;Like some soft…
.Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange;.Flutists of lands where beauty hath no change,.And wintry grief is a forgotten guest,.Sweet murmurers of everlasting rest,.For whom glad days have ever yet to run,.And moments are as aeons, and the sun.But ever sunken half-way toward the west.1.Often to me who heard you in your day,.With close rapt…
Set with a thousand islands, crowned with pines,Lies the deep water, wild Temagami:Wild for the hunter’s roving, and the useOf trappers in its dark and trackless vales,Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,And the weird magic of old Indian tales.All day with steady paddles toward the westOur heavy-laden long canoe we pressed:All day we…
The full day rests upon the luminous landIn one long noon of golden reverie.Now hath the harvest come and gone with glee.The shaven fields stretch smooth and clean away,Purple and green, and yellow, and soft gray,Chequered with orchards. Farther still I seeTowns and dim villages, whose roof-tops fillThe distant mist, yet scarcely catch the view.Thorold…
Again the warm bare earth, the noonThat hangs upon her healing scars,The midnight round, the great red moon,The mother with her brood of stars,The mist-rack and the wakening rainBlown soft in many a forest way,The yellowing elm-trees, and againThe blood-root in its sheath of gray.The vesper-sparrow’s song, the stressOf yearning notes that gush and stream,The…
