The Song of Running Water

"The light that my embanking meadow laves
Over me like a purer billow glides.
Naked in its limpid and transparent waves,
It is the magnifying image wherein I
Am the diaphanous shadow of the sky.

O beam!... O dream of fire that fills me ...
He, my heroic vow that with emotion thrills me,
Comes!... but when his flame has lapped me wholly,
From over me he rises, fleeing slowly,
And in my being I can hear a being die.

Beautiful is the forest, whose
O'er-leaning leaves temper my languid heat,
Stripped by the wind of gold he strews,
And myriad leaves are from each other singled,
Dancing to fall upon their glancing selves,
And playfully to emulate the frivolous deceit
Of a bird's pinion with my waters mingled.

Breezes, trills of songbirds warbling with a breast that wells,
All that lives and makes the forest ring retells
The melody I murmur to my tall reed-grasses,
Aery music that its spirit glasses.

O forest! O sweet forest, thou invitest me to rest
And linger in thy shade with moss and shavegrass dressed,
Imprisoning me in swoon of soft caresses
That o'er me droop thy dense and leafy tresses.

But on I glide, I go, and, fretful,
Pass under thee, gliding away my life forgetful.
The evanescent soul, the soul where thou wert glassed,
Fades, and leaves my sealed eyes nothing of the past.

Far away from me are gone
All the glimpses that upon me shone.
To other forests and to other lights,
Shaking my hair from fall to fall, from spate to spate,
I glide with hands untied, and empty-eyed,
With endless hours that fetter and control my fate.

Wandering shadow of a reverie banked and pent,
Sister of all those whom my waves entrap,
Intangible as a soul, and, like a soul,
Unfit to seize, I roll
Garlands of scattered memories, whose scent
Dies in a bitter sap.

And neither who I am nor whence I am I know ...
Under my fleeting images lives but one being,
That winds with all my windings whither they are fleeing ...
O thou whose tired feet I have bathed, and heavy brow,
And the caress of avid hands,--
O passer-by, my brother listening to me now!--
Hast thou not seen, from the waste mountains' threshold
to my far sea-sands,
Born and reborn in me, strong as the whipped flood-tides
of love's emotion,
The broad, unbroken current rolling me to the ocean?

Hast thou not seen, force without end, immortal rhythm and rhyme,
Desire impelling me beyond the bounds of Time?"