Nightward on dimmest wing in Twilight’s train The grey hours floated smoothly, lingeringly; A solemn wonder was the western sky Rich with the slow forsaking sunset-stain, Barred by long violet cloud; hillside and plain The feet of Night had touched; a wind’s low sigh Told of whole pleasure lapsed,--then rustled by With soft subsidence in the rippling grain. Why in dark dews, unready to depart, Did Evening pause and ponder, nor perceive Star follow star into the central blue? What secret was the burden of her heart? What grave, sweet memory grew she loath to leave? What finer sense, no morrow may renew?
Why do I make no poems? Good my friend Now is there silence through the summer woods, In whose green depths and lawny solitudes The light is dreaming; voicings clear ascend Now from no hollow where glad rivulets wend, But murmurings low of inarticulate moods, Softer than stir of unfledged cushat broods, Breathe, till o’erdrowsed the heavy flower-heads bend. Now sleep the crystal and heart-charmèd waves Round white, sunstricken rocks the noontide long, Or ’mid the coolness of dim lighted caves Sway in a trance of vague deliciousness; And I,--I am too deep in joy’s excess For the imperfect impulse of a song.
Spring scarce had greener fields to show than these Of mid September; through the still warm noon The rivulets ripple forth a gladder tune Than ever in the summer; from the trees Dusk-green, and murmuring inward melodies, No leaf drops yet; only our evenings swoon In pallid skies more suddenly, and the moon Finds motionless white mists out on the leas. Dear chance it were in some rough wood-god’s lair A month hence, gazing on the last bright field, To sink o’er-drowsed, and dream that wild-flowers blew Around my head and feet silently there, Till Spring’s glad choir adown the valley pealed, And violets trembled in the morning dew.
A still grey evening: Autumn in the sky, And Autumn on the hills and the sad wold; No congregated towers of pearl and gold In the vaporous West, no fiend limned duskily, No angel whose reared trump must soon be loud, Nor mountains which some pale green lake enfold Nor islands in an ocean glacial-cold; Hardly indeed a noticeable cloud. Yet here I lingered, all my will asleep, Gazing an hour with neither joy nor pain, No noonday trance in midsummer more deep; And wake with a vague yearning in the dim, Blind room, my heart scarce able to restrain The idle tears that tremble to the brim.