Most read ▸
Once in the dream of a night I stood
Lone in the light of a magical wood,
Soul-deep in visions that poppy-like sprang;
And spirits of Truth were the birds that sang,
And spirits of Love were the stars that glowed,
And spirits of Peace were the streams that flowed
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.
Lone in the light of that magical grove,
I felt the stars of the spirits of Love
Gather and gleam round my delicate youth,
And I heard the song of the spirits of Truth;
To quench my longing I bent me low
By the streams of the spirits of Peace that flow
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.
The fairest Home I ever knew
Was founded in an Hour
By Parties also that I knew
A spider and a Flower --
A manse of mechlin and of Floes --
Believe me, this was true last night,
Tho' it is false to-day.
-- A.M.F. Robinson.
A fair dream to my chamber flew:
Such a crowd of folk that stirred,
Jested, fluttered; only you,
You alone of all that band,
Calm and silent, spake no word.
Only once you neared my place,
And your hand one moment's space
Sought the fingers of my hand;
Your eyes flashed to mine; I knew
All was well between us two.
On from dream to dream I past,
But the first sweet vision cast
Mystic radiance o'er the last.
Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn :
It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond
Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond
Stares. And you sing, you sing.
That star-enchanted song falls through the air
From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,
Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground ;
While all the night you sing.
My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee,
As all night long I listen, and my brain
Receives your song, then loses it again
In moonlight on the lawn.
Now is your voice a marble high and white,
Then like a mist on fields of paradise ;
Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,
Then breaks, and it is dawn.
A languid atmosphere, a lazy breeze,
With labored respiration, moves the wheat
From distant reaches, till the golden seas
Break in crisp whispers at my feet.
My book, neglected of an idle mind,
Hides for a moment from the eyes of men;
Or lightly opened by a critic wind,
Affrightedly reviews itself again.
Off through the haze that dances in the shine
The warm sun showers in the open glade,
The forest lies, a silhouette design
Dimmed through and through with shade.
A dreamy day; and tranquilly I lie
At anchor from all storms of mental strain;
With absent vision, gazing at the sky,
"Like one that hears it rain."
THE new moon hangs like an ivory bugle
In the naked frosty blue;
And the ghylls of the forest, already blackened
By Winter, are blackened anew.
The brooks that cut up and increase the forest,
As if they had never known
The sun, are roaring with black hollow voices
Betwixt rage and a moan.
But still the caravan-hut by the hollies
Like a kingfisher gleams between:
Round the mossed old hearths of the charcoal-burners
First primroses ask to be seen.
The charcoal-burners are black, but their linen
Blows white on the line;
And white the letter the girl is reading
Under that crescent fine;
O ripples in the marshland grass
Like waves on an enchanted sea,
The winds, with trailing garments pass
Invisible adown the lea
Each footprint, evanescent, pressed
In shadowed highlight, trough and crest.
No spray upon those waves is seen
To splash upon the marshy bank;
Uncanny sea so strangely green!
While lurking in those coverts dank
What things of the abyss may dwell
Only the fear hushed winds might tell.
Far off where dunes aspiring melt
Into the sky, those currents flow
In turmoil neither heard nor felt
How furtively they come and go!
No, I shall never climb above the hill,
But, wistful, pause halfway and take my fill
Of wondering —
Behind me lies the valley, hot and still,
A roof-scarred thing.
If, like a lagging cloud with slow, white feet,
I should surmount the hill, would I then greet
The spray-wreathed sea?
And would the eager winds blow keen and sweet
Up, up to me?
Halfway, my craven heart shall ever bide.
Content in hoping that the other side
Shines on a silver shore,
Yet fearful lest the high hills only hide
More vale — and nothing more.
Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.
In Warsaw in Poland
Half the world away,
The one I love best of all
Thought of me to-day;
I know, for I went
Winged as a bird,
In the wide flowing wind
His own voice I heard;
His arms were round me
In a ferny place,
I looked in the pool
And there was his face--
But now it is night
And the cold stars say:
"Warsaw in Poland
Is half the world away."
Endlessly fell her chestnut flowers,
Faint snow throughout the honeyed dark ;
The myrtle spread his boughs to drink
Deep draughts of salt from the sea's brink,
And like a moon-dial swung her tower's
Straight shadow o'er her warded park.
From her calm coasts the galleons fled,
The fisher steered him further west,
No port was hailed, no keel came home
Across that pale, enchanted foam,
But by her roof the thrushes fed
And wandering swallows found their rest.
The shadows touched her tenderly,
The red beam lingered on her dress;
The white gull and the osprey knew
Her tower across the leagues of blue.
Over the pool of sleep
The night mists creep,
Then faint thin light and then clear day,
Noontide, and lingering afternoon;
Then that Wanderer, the Moon
Wandering her old wild way.
How many spirits follow
Her in that dark hollow!
Like a lost lamb she roams on high
Through the cold and soundless sky,
And stares down into her deep
Reflection in the pool of sleep.
How many follow
Her in that lone hollow!
She sees them not nor would she hear
Though both shape and sound were clear,