The speaker addresses a beloved person walking alone through a day in the countryside after he is gone. Under a brilliant blue sky and later a windy, star-filled night, the beloved moves through clover fields, woods, and shore, surrounded by crickets, waves, and the swaying moon. Those details feel luminous but solitary, as if grief has sharpened every sight and sound. The speaker’s own absence appears only at the end—the vacant chair rocking on the porch—and gives the whole scene its ache. Yet his final words are tender and steadying: “Be brave, Beloved!” The mood is elegiac and intimate, mixing sorrow with the quiet majesty of the natural world.
Charles Webster — Summary
The pine woods on the hill, And the farmhouse miles away, Showed clear as though behind a lens Under a sky of peacock blue! But a blanket of cloud by afternoon Muffled the earth. And you walked the road And the clover field, where the only sound Was the cricket’s liquid tremolo. Then the sun went down between great drifts Of distant storms. For a rising wind Swept clean the sky and blew the flames Of the unprotected stars; And swayed the russet moon, Hanging between the rim of the hill And the twinkling boughs of the apple orchard. You walked the shore in thought Where the throats of the waves were like whip-poor-wills Singing beneath the water and crying To the wash of the wind in the cedar trees, Till you stood, too full for tears, by the cot, And looking up saw Jupiter, Tipping the spire of the giant pine, And looking down saw my vacant chair, Rocked by the wind on the lonely porch— Be brave, Beloved!