Blow through me wind
As you blow through apple blossoms....
Scatter me in shining petals over the passers-by....
Joyously I reunite... sway and gather to myself....
Sedately I walk by the dancing feet of children--
Not knowing I too dance over the cobbled spring.
O, but they laugh back at me,
(Eyes like daisies smiling wide open),
And we both look askance at the snowed-in people
Thinking me one of them.
Let all the towns remember you.
And tell it out with mellow tongue,
Down April yards at fall of dew —
That you were fair, that you were young.
A wind at dusk shaken to and fro
Against a melon-colored pane;
White flags in a brief, wistful row;
An only star after a rain.
But let this secret keep unsung;
Nor wise nor fool must it divine,
And tell it out with April tongue —
That all this loveliness was mine !
On the flowering twig,
Lo! the robin is singing.
It must be spring.
Cherry and pear are white,
Their snows lie sprinkled on the land like light
On darkness shed.
Far off and near
The orchards toss their crowns of delight,
And the sun casts down
Another shining crown.
The wind tears and throws down
Petal by petal the crown
Of cherry and pear till the earth is white,
And all the brightness is shed
In the orchards far off and near,
That tossed by the road and under the green hill;
And the wind is fled.
Far, far off the wind
Has shaken down
So fair, that all the morning aches
With such monotony!
So brief, that sadness breaks
The brittle spell.
Nothing so fair, nothing so brief:
The sun leaps up and falls.
The wind tosses every leaf:
Every leaf dies.
Blossom, a white cloud in the air,
Is blown like a cloud away.
Must all be brief, being fair?
Nothing remain?
Yes, night and that high regiment
Of stars that wheel and march,
Ever their bright lines bent
To a secret thought;
Is it because Spring now is come
That my heart leaps in its bed of dust?
Is it with sorrow or strange pleasure
To watch the green time's gathering treasure?
Or is there some too sharp distaste
In all this quivering green and gold?
Something that makes bare boughs yet barer,
And the eye's pure delight the rarer?
Not that the new found Spring is sour....
The blossom swings on the cherry branch,
From Wear to Thames I have seen this greenness
Cover the six-months-winter meanness.
And windflowers and yellow gillyflowers
Pierce the astonished earth with light:
And most-loved wallflower's bloody petal
Shakes over that long frosty battle.
The birds return,
The blossom brightens again the cherry bough.
The hedges are green again
In the airless lane,
And hedge and blossom and bird call, Now, now, now!
O birds, return!
Who will care if the blossom die on the bough,
Or the hedge be bare again
In the screaming lane?
For what they were these are not, are not now.
The one gone makes
All that remain seem strange and lonely now.
She will not walk here again
In the blossoming lane:--
And there's a dead bough in every blossoming bough.
So long as there is April
My heart is high,
Lifting up its white dreams
To the sky.
As trees hold up their blossoms
In a blowing cloud,
My hands are reaching.
My hands are proud.
All the crumbled splendours
Of autumn, and the cries
Of winds that I remember
Cannot make me wise.
Like the trees of April
Fearless and fair —
My heart swings its censers
Through the golden air.
"Dear brother, dearest friend, when I am dead,
And you shall see no more this face of mine,
Let nothing but red roses be the sign
Of the white life I lost for him," she said;
"No, do not curse him, -- pity him instead;
Forgive him! -- forgive me! . . God's anodyne
For human hate is pity; and the wine
That makes men wise, forgiveness. I have read
Love's message in love's murder, and I die."
And so they laid her just where she would lie, --
Under red roses. Red they bloomed and fell;
But when flushed autumn and the snows went by,
And spring came, -- lo, from every bud's green shell
Burst a white blossom. -- Can love reason why?
The wild duck fly over
From river to river
And so the young lover
Goes roving for ever.
They fly together,
He walks alone :
No maiden can tether
Him with her moan.
At the bursting of blossom
On her breast his head ;
He has left her bosom
Ere the apples are red.
Across the valley,
Singing he goes.
In highway and alley
He seeks a new rose.
All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!
Ere spring was going--ah, spring is gone!
And there comes no summer to the like of you and me,--
Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.
All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,
Browned at the edges, turned in a day;
And I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,
And weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!
The cuckoo and the coo-dove's ceaseless calling,
Calling,
Of a meaningless monotony is palling
All my morning's pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered
wood.
May-blossom and blue bird's-eye flowers falling,
Falling
In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling
Messages of true-love down the dust of the highroad.
I do not like to hear the gentle grieving,
Grieving
Of the she-dove in the blossom, still believing
Love will yet again return to her and make all good.
When I know that there must ever be deceiving,
Deceiving
Of the mournful constant heart, that while she's