The Magic House and Other Poems 10

The Magic House and Other Poems 10

NIGHT AND THE PINES

 

 

Here in the pine shade is the nest of night,

Lined deep with shadows, odorous and dim,

And here he stays his sweeping flight,

Here where the strongest wind is lulled for him,

He lingers brooding until dawn,

While all the trembling stars move on and on.

 

Under the cliff there drops a lonely fall,

Deep and half heard its thunder lifts and booms;

Afar the loons with eerie call

Haunt all the bays, and breaking through the glooms

Upfloats that cry of light despair,

As if a demon laughed upon the air.

 

A raven croaks from out his ebon sleep,

When a brown cone falls near him through the dark;

And when the radiant meteors sweep

Afar within the larches wakes the lark;

The wind moves on the cedar hill,

Tossing the weird cry of the whip-poor-will.

 

Sometimes a titan wind, slumbrous and hushed,

Takes the dark grove within his swinging power;

And like a cradle softly pushed,

The shade sways slowly for a lulling hour;

While through the cavern sweeps a cry,

A Sibyl with her secret prophecy.

 

When morning lifts its fragile silver dome,

And the first eagle takes the lonely air,

Up from his dense and sombre home

The night sweeps out, a tireless wayfarer,

Leaving within the shadows deep,

The haunting mood and magic of his sleep.

 

And so we cannot come within this grove,

But all the quiet dusk remembrance brings

Of ancient sorrow and of hapless love,

Fate, and the dream of power, and piercing things

Traces of mystery and might,

The passion-sadness of the soul of night.

 

 

 

 

A NIGHT IN MARCH

 

 

At eve the fiery sun went forth

Flooding the clouds with ruby blood,

Up roared a war-wind from the north

And crashed at midnight through the wood.

 

The demons danced about the trees,

The snow slipped singing over the wold,

And ever when the wind would cease

A lynx cried out within the cold.

 

A spirit walked the ringing rooms,

Passing the locked and secret door,

Heavy with divers ancient dooms,

With dreams dead laden to the core.

 

‘Spirit, thou art too deep with woe,

I have no harbour place for thee,

Leave me to lesser griefs, and go,

Go with the great wind to the sea.’

 

I faltered like a frightened child,

That fears its nurse’s fairy brood,

And as I spoke, I heard the wild

Wind plunging through the shattered wood.

 

‘Hast thou betrayed the rest of kings,

With tragic fears and spectres wan,

My dreams are lit with purer things,

With humbler ghosts, begone, begone.’

 

The noisy dark was deaf and blind,

Still the strange spirit strayed or stood,

And I could only hear the wind

Go roaring through the riven wood.

 

‘Art thou the fate for some wild heart,

That scorned his cavern’s curve and bars,

That leaped the bounds of time and art,

And lost thee lingering near the stars?’

 

It was so still I heard my thought,

Even the wind was very still,

The desolate deeper silence brought

The lynx-moan from the lonely hill.

 

‘Art thou the thing I might have been,

If all the dead had known control,

Risen through the ages’ trembling sheen,

A mirage of my desert soul?’

 

The wind rushed down the roof in wrath,

Then shrieked and held its breath and stood,

Like one who finds beside his path,

A dead girl in the marish wood.

 

‘Or have I ceased, as those who die

And leave the broken word unsaid,

Art thou the spirit ministry

That hovers round the newly dead?’

 

The auroras rose in solitude,

And wanly paled within the room,

The window showed an ebon rood,

Upon the blanched and ashen gloom.

 

I heard a voice within the dark,

That answered not my idle word,

I could not choose but pause and hark,

It was so magically stirred.

 

It grew within the quiet hour,

With the rose shadows on the wall,

It had a touch of ancient power,

A wild and elemental fall;

 

Its rapture had a dreaming close:

The dawn grew slowly on the wold,

Spreading in fragile veils of rose,

In tender lines of lemon-gold.

 

The world was turning into light,

Was sweeping into life and peace,

And folded in the fading night,

I felt the dawning sink and cease.

 

 

 

 

SEPTEMBER

 

 

The morns are grey with haze and faintly cold,

The early sunsets arc the west with red;

The stars are misty silver overhead,

Above the dawn Orion lies outrolled.

Now all the slopes are slowly growing gold,

And in the dales a deeper silence dwells;

The crickets mourn with funeral flutes and bells,

For days before the summer had grown old.

 

Now the night-gloom with hurrying wings is stirred,

Strangely the comrade pipings rise and sink,

The birds are following in the pathless dark

The footsteps of the pilgrim summer. Hark!

Was that the redstart or the bobolink?

That lonely cry the summer-hearted bird?

 

 

 

 

BY THE WILLOW SPRING

 

TO E. W.

 

 

Come hither, Care, and look on this fair place,

But leave your gossip and your puckered face

Beyond that flowering carrot in the glow,

Where the red poppies in the orchard blow,

And come with gentle feet; the last thing there

Was a white butterfly upon the air,

And even now a thrush was in the grass,

To feel the sovereign water slowly pass.

This pool is quiet as oblivion,

Hidden securely from the flooding sun;

Its crystal placid surface here receives