The Song Outside

When will you come, you maiden by the window,
Come out and leave your little window, there?
Why will you bind your heart up every morning,
As every morning you bind your hair?
Your vine astir would wake a cloud of swallows;
The sower’s forth and every worker follows;
The world goes forth, to earn, to seek, to share!
Why is it, little face behind a window,
You do not dare,
You do not dare?

Then will you come, you maiden by the window,
To hear the heart of twilight in the air?
And will you heed the breathing of the wayside,
And all the wise, wide singing everywhere?—
And you and more than you, and more than neighbor,
—With care and bloom, despair and wrinkled labor,
It folds, it holds them all, till they are fair;
—Fairer than you, my maiden by the window,
And unaware,
—All unaware!