April

PALE season, watcher in unvexed suspense,
Still priestess of the patient middle day,
Betwixt wild March's humoured pestilence
And the warm wooing of green-kirtled May,
Maid month of sunny peace and sober grey,
Weaver of flowers in sunward glades that ring
With murmur of libation to the spring.

As memory of pain all past is peace,
And joy, dream-tasted, hath the deeper cheer.
So art thou sweetest of all months that lease
The twelve short spaces of the flying year.
The bloomless days are dead, and frozen fear
No more for many moons shall vex the earth,
Dreaming of summer and fruit-laden mirth.

The grey song-sparrows, full of spring, have sung
Their clear thin silvery tunes in leafless trees.
The robin hops and whistles, and among
The silver tasselled poplars, the brown bees
Murmur faint dreams of summer harvestries.
The creamy sun at even scatters down
A gold green mist across the murmuring town.

By the slow streams the frogs all day and night
Dream without thought of pain or heed of ill,
Watching the warm long silent hours take flight,
And ever with soft throats that pulse and thrill
From the pale weeded shallow trill and trill,
Tremulous sweet-voices, flute-like, answering
One to another glorying in the spring.

All day across the ever-cloven soil
Strong horses labour, steaming in the sun,
Down the long furrows with slow straining toil,
Turning the brown clean layers ; and one by one
The crows gloom over them, till daylight done
Sends them asleep somewhere in dusked lines
Beyond the wheat-lands in the northern pines.

The old year's cloaking of brown leaves that bind
The forest floorways, plated close and true,
The last love's labour of the wearing wind,
Is broken with curled flower buds, white and blue,
In all the matted hollows, and speared through
With thousand serpent-spotted blades upsprung,
Yet bloomless, of the slender adder-tongue.

In the warm noon the south wind creeps and cools,
Where the red-budded stems of maples throw
Still tangled etchings on the amber pools,
Quite silent now, forgetful of the slow
Drip of the taps, the troughs, and trampled snow,
The keen March mornings and the silvering rime,
And mirthful labour of the sugar prime.

Ah, I have wandered with unwearied feet
All the long sweetness of an April day,
Lulled with cool murmurs and the drowsy beat
Of partridge wings in secret thickets grey,
The marriage hymns of all the birds at play.
The faces of sweet flowers, and easeful dreams
Beside slow reaches of frog-haunted streams ;

Wandered with happy feet, and quite forgot
The shallow toil, the strife against the grain,
Near souls that hear us call, but answer not,
The weariness, perplexity, and pain,
And high thoughts cautered with an earthly stain ;
And now the long draught emptied to the lees,
I turn me homeward in slow-pacing ease.

Cleaving the cedar shadows and the thin
Mist of grey gnats, that cloud the river shore,
Sweet even choruses, that dance and spin
Soft tangles in the sunset, and once more
The city smites me with its dissonant roar ;
To its hot heart I pass, untroubled yet,
Fed with calm hope without desire or fret

So to the year's first altar step I bring
Gifts of meek song, and make my spirit free
With the blind working of unanxious spring,
Careless with her whether the days that flee
Pale drouth or golden-fruited plenty see,
So that we toil, brothers, without distress
In calm-eyed peace and god-like blamelessness.