Myth and Romance: Being a Book of Verses. Cawein Madison Julius

      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.

      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?

      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.

      The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,

      Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;

      The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour,

      Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;

      While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,

      Brood-hens have housed.—But I, who scorned thy power,

      Barometer of the birds,—like August there,—

      Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,

      Like some drenched truant, cower.

      Globed in Heav'n's tree of azure, golden mellow

      As some round apple hung

      High in hesperian boughs, thou hangest yellow

      The branch-like mists among:

      Within thy light a sunburnt youth, named Health,

      Rests 'mid the tasseled shocks, the tawny stubble;

      And by his side, clad on with rustic wealth

      Of field and farm, beneath thy amber bubble,

      A nut-brown maid, Content, sits smiling still:

      While through the quiet trees,

      The mossy rocks, the grassy hill,

      Thy silvery spirit glides to yonder mill,

      Around whose wheel the breeze

      And shimmering ripples of the water play,

      As, by their mother, little children may.

      Sweet spirit of the moon, who walkest,—lifting

      Exhaustless on thy arm,

      A pearly vase of fire,—through the shifting

      Cloud-halls of calm and storm,

      Pour down thy blossoms! let me hear them come,

      Pelting with noiseless light the twinkling thickets,

      Making the darkness audible with the hum

      Of many insect creatures, grigs and crickets:

      Until it seems the elves hold revelries

      By haunted stream and grove;

      Or, in the night's deep peace,

      The young-old presence of Earth's full increase

      Seems telling thee her love,

      Ere, lying down, she turns to rest, and smiles,

      Hearing thy heart beat through the myriad miles.

      Wild ridge on ridge the wooded hills arise,

      Between whose breezy vistas gulfs of skies

      Pilot great clouds like towering argosies,

      And hawk and buzzard breast the azure breeze.

      With many a foaming fall and glimmering reach

      Of placid murmur, under elm and beech,

      The creek goes twinkling through long glows and glooms

      Of woodland quiet, poppied with perfumes:

      The creek, in whose clear shallows minnow-schools

      Glitter or dart; and by whose deeper pools

      The blue kingfishers and the herons haunt;

      That, often startled from the freckled flaunt

      Of blackberry-lilies—where they feed and hide—

      Trail a lank flight along the forestside

      With eery clangor. Here a sycamore,

      Smooth, wave-uprooted, builds from shore to shore

      A headlong bridge; and there, a storm-hurled oak

      Lays a long dam, where sand and gravel choke

      The water's lazy way. Here mistflower blurs

      Its bit of heaven; there the oxeye stirs

      Its gloaming hues of bronze and gold; and here,

      A gray cool stain, like dawn's own atmosphere,

      The dim wild-carrot lifts its crumpled crest:

      And over all, at slender flight or rest,

      The dragon-flies, like coruscating rays

      Of lapis-lazuli and chrysoprase,

      Drowsily sparkle through the summer days;

      And, dewlap-deep, here from the noontide heat

      The bell-hung cattle find a cool retreat:

      And through the willows girdling the hill,

      Now far, now near, borne as the soft winds will,

      Comes the low rushing of the water-mill.

      Ah, lovely to me from a little child,

      How changed the place! wherein once, undefiled,

      The glad communion of the sky and stream

      Went with me like a presence and a dream.

      Where once the brambled meads and orchardlands

      Poured ripe abundance down with mellow hands

      Of summer; and the birds of field and wood

      Called to me in a tongue I understood;

      And in the tangles of the old rail-fence

      Even the insect tumult had some sense,

      And every sound a happy eloquence;

      And