David Morton

“ The Spring has crowned the startled grass with light,
And lit each apple-tree with blooms of May,
Her footprints flowering through the silent night,
Show where she went her hurried, careless way ...
A magic that awakens and goes by,
Too care-free to be bound, too fickle-fleet,
Leaves helpless legions staring at the sky,
Confronted with a later, sure defeat.
A bird, half-hid among the apple boughs,
Sings and sings on above the blossoming earth,
A high, clear music of eternal vows
To transient joy ... and joy's eternal worth ... ”

“ That lean and listen for the turning earth,
Are never wholly careless when they hear
The murmur of her hushed and quiet mirth,—
But looking out upon a world in bloom,
They half-remember, and they heed and hark:
An old, old sweetness in the scented gloom,
An old, old music in the singing dark.
Their own full Summers gone, such æons past,
Bird-song and bloom and swallow from the sky,
These dead, desireless worlds find here, at last,
Something remembered when the earth turns by,
Sweet with these blowing odours they had known,
This happy music that was once their own. ”

“ Where all the fret of life seems nothing worth,
And grief, itself, a half-forgotten thing,
Less keen than these cool odours of the earth,—
I sometimes think we find the secret gate
That gives on gardens of enchanted light,
Restoring glories that we lost of late,
To quiet wisdom and more certain sight.
A holier mood will haunt our stubborn will,
Till we shall see revealments through the grass,
And stop, abashed, before a daffodil,
A shining weed, a stone on ways we pass,
Stand with bared head before the evening star,
And know these holy things for what they are. ”

“ Dripping sunlight where it goes,
Wheels and glitters and returns:
Bladed beauty's lifted urns;
Woods all shadowed, cooling earth,
Murmuring of a quiet mirth, [16]
Pour damp odours where they pass,
Breath of fern and earth and grass ...
Ramblers on a lichened wall,
Ramblers, ramblers pouring all
Colour that the world has known
Out upon an aging stone.—
Little towns of street and spire,
Dooryard roses, heart's desire,
Light a dream within the mind,
Light a dream ... and fall behind. ”

“ Hands and hair and hearts, at last,
Dust! Till now, their slumbers past,
Roses bloom about her door,
Beauty, beauty evermore....
Trojan maidens who had been
Still, white faces through the din
Of those chariots gone by,
Stars above a troubled sky—
Beauty passing to re-pass,
Pearl-white feet across the grass,
Crowns of beauty that they wore
Given to the dust for more [62]
Roses, roses at her door....
All old tales of beauty dead,
Hands and hair and lifted head,
Gone from cities long forgot:
Rimini and Camelot,
Lovers who had been like light,
Summertime and dream ... ”

“ Most holy in her street and spire,
Most perfectly at rest,—
Ah, God, who knows what hid desire
Is in her breast,
Where peony or daffodil
Or wayward rose begins,
Burning her drifted bosom, still,
Like secret sins.
[93]
THE YEAR IS OLD
Day fades with fading colours from the sky,
And blue smoke blowing where the hills are gold,
Is all a tale of loveliness gone by:
Summer is ended, and the year is old,
Beauty and bloom are wet leaves in the grass,
And music is a lone wind on the hill,
Crying that all things beautiful must pass,
Crying that beauty is remembered still. ”

“ It never could be careless of the Spring;
But turning with the happy-minded earth,
When straying Aprils stir the sentient mould,
It still will know these festivals of mirth,
These subtle sorceries of green and gold.
And we may yet discover, after all,
How flesh is glory whitening on the hedge,
Or wine-red tulips burning at a wall;—
And we may learn, by some wild-flowered ledge,
How solemn dust at last turns gay again,
To light the Spring for later, wandering men. ”

“ Lives in their hearts in still and sweet renown.
The market square, the wagons in the dawn,
The streets like music when their names are said,
The Sunday spire, the green, untrammelled lawn,—
These be the things on which their hearts are fed.
And one long street climbs slowly to a hill
That lifts her crosses for the Town to see
How sleep those quiet neighbours, townsmen still,
How there is peace for such as weary be ... ”

“ Whose crimson petals stained the grass with crime!
Mood after mood, its subtle secret hid,
Plies in the earth and has its moody way,
Patient or swift—to build a pyramid,
Or strike a Phidias from the quickened clay ...
A reverie, that is cities on a hill,
Or laughter trembling in a daffodil.
[44]
CLEAR MORNING
The air is full of thin and blowing bells
Whose delicate, faint music breaks and swells
For every lightest wind, and dies unheard,—
Unless it be by some leaf-hidden bird,
Or some shy faun who listens in the reeds,
If haply there be tunes to suit his needs. ”

“ And winds that left their sails in flagging strips;
Nothing disturbs them now, no stormy grips
That once had hurt their sides, no crash or swell,
Nor can the fretful harbour quite dispel
This quiet that they learned on lonely trips.
They have no part in all the noisy noons;
They are become as dreams of ships that go
Back to the secret waters that they know,
Each as she will to unforgot lagoons,
Where nothing moves except the ghostly spars
That mark the patient watches on the stars. ”

“ This glittering sense of bright and bladed grass,
Of hedges topped with blossom, white like foam,
And moons that know a purple way to pass,—
This beauty that the mind has taken home—
Goes never wholly from us at the last,
But stays beyond each summer's slow decay,
Storing our thought with summers that are past:
Hedges and moons, white in their ancient way. ”

“ The way the spring comes to our Town is such
That something quickens in the hearts of men,
Turning them lovers at its subtle touch,
Till they must lift their heads again—again—
As lovers do, with frank, adoring eyes,
Where the long street of lifted steeples lies. ”

“ These frail, white blooms have lit the Summer night
Like ghosts of beauty that had gone too soon,—
With something less than any glimmering light
That sways and faints and trembles in the moon.
I think the Earth, grown half-regretful, now,
Of faces that were lovely of old time,
Lifts here again dim hands and hair and brow,
In loveliness more fragile than a rhyme. ”

“ Of swaying girls who thronged these ordered ways
Like windy tulips blowing in their beds.
Stones may remember laughter down a hall,
And eyes more bright than blossoms in the grass,—
A dream to haunt them—after all and all—
When they are dust with dusty things that pass.
So that some wind of beauty, waking then,
Whose breath shall be new summertimes for earth,
Will stir these scattered stones to dreams, again,
Of blowing shapes, of brightening eyes and mirth,
And corridors, like windy tulip beds,
Of swaying girls and beautiful, bright heads.
[74]
AT ELSINORE
... ”

“ Gone in a transient spring?
Spending and spilling your wealth through the grass,
Coiner of coins that must rust and pass,—
Knowing the end is—alas, and alas!
What may a poet sing?
"Sing of the dust that is blossomy boughs,
Dust that is more than your thought allows;
Sing you for ever impossible vows
Unto the springs to be.
"Dust in the dust is for fire and birth,
Beauty and passion and red-lipped mirth,
Fashioned of dust for the blossoming earth,—
Even of you and me."
[28]
JEWELS
The sea has worn her ships like precious stones,
That marked her bosom's tremulous unrest ”

“ They haunt the secret by-ways of the air.
They know Earth's outer regions like a street,
And on pale ships that make no port of call,
They pass in silence when they chance to meet,
Saying no names, telling no tales at all. ”

“ Where bends and sways the long, dream-troubled grass,
That I may know the heart-beats, tender still,
Of gone, forgotten lovers where they pass,—
Their love, too long for one brief life to hold,
Beating and burning through this dust and gold.
[48]
VINES
No hint was told to these untutored seed:
Along the mould wherein their roots are curled,
No whisper runs of station, caste or creed,
To guide their tendrils through a jealous world. ”

“ Men who have loved the ships they took to sea,
Loved the tall masts, the prows that creamed with foam,
Have learned, deep in their hearts, how it might be
That there is yet a dearer thing than home.
The decks they walk, the rigging in the stars,
The clean boards counted in the watch they keep,—
These, and the sunlight on the slippery spars,
Will haunt them ever, waking and asleep.
Ashore, these men are not as other men ”

“ The drowsy stir of birds, surprised from sleep,
The faint applause of leaves above the lawn,
The bleat, far off, of closely-cabined sheep,—
Are like dim perfumes blowing down the stairs,
All sweetly prescient of the coming day,—
And less like sounds, than little tender airs
Gone softly shod and happily astray.
The later sleepers, where the garden lies,
Such heavy-lidded ladies as the rose,
Hear the soft tumult with a dim surprise,
There, where an early wind as roundsman goes,
To rouse each languid, over-sleepy head,
And shame them that they lie so long abed. ”

“ And windy capes that tried their slender spars,
The tortuous channels where their keels have gone,
And calm, blue nights of stillness and the stars.
Ah, never think that ships forget a shore,
Or bitter seas, or winds that made them wise;
There is a dream upon them, evermore;—
And there be some who say that sunk ships rise
To seek familiar harbours in the night,
Blowing in mists, their spectral sails like light. ”

“ That once were light, and summertime and dream,
And drifted laughter over hall and stair.
The viols end, and two by two they pass
Out of this blaze into the leafy dark,
Too ghostly and too dim across the grass,
Too soon obscured and blotted, all,—till Hark!
This old, slow music that is like a sigh
For silver feet gone, ah, how lightly by.
[40]
REDEMPTION
The old gods wait where secret beauty stirs,
By green, untempled altars of the Spring,
If haply, still, there be some worshippers
Whose hearts are moved with long remembering. ”

“ An old, old May, remembered of the Spring,
Returning ghostwise on such days as these,
Moves in the blowing odours where they pass,
Trailing these scattered blossoms in the grass.
[90]
FUGITIVE
Behind these falling curtains of the rain,
Beauty goes by, a phantom on the hill,
A timid fugitive beyond the lane,
In rainy silver,—and so shy and still
That only peering eyes of some hid bird,
Or furry ears that listened by a stone,
Could guess at Something neither seen nor heard,
Finding escape, and faring by, alone. ”

“ Toward the eternal night of restless shapes,
They walk in awful splendour, regal yet,
Wearing their crimes like rich and kingly capes....
Curse them or taunt, they will not hear or see;
The Kings are passing deathward: let them be. ”

“ The shining spars, the sails, the light they gave,
Now scattered darkly on her grievous floors;—
And all the sea's long moan is like a sigh
For ruined ships remembered where they lie.
[29]
CHORUS
Always it was the old songs moved us most,
For always there were other voices near,
A silver singing threading like a ghost,
A thinner music than our ears could hear ”

“ Of hedges, and their first, frail blossoming mirth.
I have imagined, too, in some such wise
Death may allow, within her darkened room,
Some subtle intimation of wide skies,
Of startled grasses, and the hedge in bloom,—
And we may know when some far spring comes down,
Wearing her magic slippers through the town.
[86]
II FEVER
The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed,
To flesh that fever makes a cinder of,—
An angel with cool hands to cup his need,
In ministrations, kinder yet than love. ”

“ And jonquils trace the golden writs of mirth;
Some slow, imperfect patterns must be wrought
Some, cast aside in dark, abandoned crypts,
Before the swift, impulsive hands are taught
To shape the Spring's illuminated scripts.
What gifted fingers are so quick to mould
And form aright the thin Aprilian line,
The frail, fair lettering in green and gold!—
What art has taught that intricate design,
From which those later scriveners compose
Such final, crowning rubrics as the rose!
[69]
MOONS KNOW NO TIME
Moonlight is memory ... ”