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Page 14
The boy has lingered late in the grey fields,
Knowing the first strange happiness of pain,
And the low voices of October moods.
Now comes the night, the meadow yields
Unto the sky a damp and pungent breath;
The quiet air of the New England town
Seems confident that everyone is home
Safe by his fire.
The frosty stars look down
Near, near above the kind familiar trees
In whose dry branches roam
The gentle spirits of the darkling breeze.
Deep in its caverned heart the forest sings
Of mysteries unknown and vanished lore;
Old wisdom; dead desire;
Dreams of the past, of immemorial springs....
The wind is rising cold from the river: close the door.
Tours, 1918
XIV
O lovely shepherd Corydon, how far
Thou wanderest from thine Ionian hills;
Now the first star
Rains pallid tears where the lost lands are,
And the red sunset fills
The cleft horizon with a flaming wine.
The grave significance of falling leaves
Soon shall make desolate thy singing heart,
When the cold wind grieves,
And the cold dews rot the standing sheaves,--
Return, O Thou that art
The hope of spring in these lost lands of mine.
Chalons-sur-Marne, 1917
XV
O little shepherd boy, what sobs are those
That shake your slender shoulders, what despair
Has run her fingers through your rumpled hair,
And laid you prone beneath a weight of woes?
The trees upon the hill will soon be bare,
A yellow blight is on the garden close,
But you, you need not mourn the vanished rose,
For many springs will find you just as fair.
Weep not for summer, she is past all weeping,
Fear not the winter, she in turn will pass,
And with the spring love waits for you, perchance,
When, with the morn, faint wings stir from their sleeping,
And the first petals scatter on the grass,
Under the orchards and the vines of France.
Recicourt, 1917
XVI
The dull-eyed girl in bronze implores Apollo
To warm these dying satyrs and to raise
Their withered wreaths that rot in every hollow
Or smoulder redly in the pungent haze.
The shining reapers, gone these many days,
Have left their fields disconsolate and sear,
Like bony sand uncovered to the gaze,
In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
My wisest comrade turns into a swallow
And flashes southward as the thickets blaze
In awful splendour; I, who cannot follow,
Confront the skies' unmitigated greys.
The cynic faun whom I have known betrays
A dangerous mood at night, and seems austere
Beneath the autumn noon's distempered rays,
In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
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