Redbirds, redbirds,
Long and long ago,
What a honey-call you had
In hills I used to know;
Redbud, buckberry,
Wild plum-tree
And proud river sweeping
Southward to the sea,
Brown and gold in the sun
Sparkling far below,
Trailing stately round her bluffs
Where the poplars grow--
Redbirds, redbirds,
Are you singing still
As you sang one May day
On Saxton's Hill?
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;
Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;
Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,
I saw above a sea of hills
A solitary planet shine,
And there was no one near or far
To keep the world from being mine.
My heart has grown rich with the passing of years,
I have less need now than when I was young
To share myself with every comer
Or shape my thoughts into words with my tongue.
It is one to me that they come or go
If I have myself and the drive of my will,
And strength to climb on a summer night
And watch the stars swarm over the hill.
Let them think I love them more than I do,
Let them think I care, though I go alone;
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me
Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone.
Not by the sea, but somewhere in the hills,
Not by the sea, but in the uplands surely
There must be rest where a dim pool demurely
Watches all night the stern slow-moving skies;
Not by the sea, that never was appeased,
Not by the sea, whose immemorial longing
Shames the tired earth where even longing dies,
Not by the sea that bore Iseult and Helen,
But in a dark green hollow of the hills
There must be sleep, even for sleepless eyes.
Now the mountain top is won,
Behold the valley in the sun —
The gold and yellow farms that lie
Bare-bosomed to the courting sky;
The olive hills, the meadows green.
The towns that punctuate the scene;
The little spires that seem to cry
For leaves and blossoms to the sky.
So delicate, it seems the breeze
Must stir them like the willow trees.
Ah, happy vale, how sweet you are,
As I observe you from this car;
How pleasant here to sit and shirk
And know your dwellers are at work!
Blue moth!...
Tiny, pulsating thing ...
You and I met upon a rocky hill.
I paused ...
You paused, and poised
Blue,
Blue on a dark stone:
And all the vibrant sunshine in the world
Was caught for the sparkle
On your tiny wings ...
Blue moth!
Looking up the hill
The road was long before me.
This road is longer.
The hills kneel in a huddled group,
Like camels of the caravan,
And winter piles upon their patient backs
Its snows.
And through the desert of long nights and days
I think I see them stepping — stepping —
In misty file.
Toward the green land of Spring!
By southern seas I have seen purple stones
Throw back the shadows of the waves and hills.
On the Ægean, so the stories run,
Greek youths, with many a saffron-coloured sail,
Rode flame-like to the rhythm of the gale.
Again, on the bright shores of this small lake,
Purple of hills and pink of northern rocks.
To-day I met a sail-boat in the wind
And at its mast a brown Canadian boy--
He was as splendid as his mate of Troy.
I heard a piper piping
The blue hills among--
And never did I hear
So plaintive a song.
It seemed but a part
Of the hills' melancholy:
No piper living there
Could ever be jolly!
And still the piper piped
The blue hills among,
And all the birds were quiet
To listen to his song.
Hills that were dark
At sparing-time last night
Now in the dawn-ring
Glimmer cold and white.