Softly blow lightly
O twilight breeze
Scarcely bend slightly
O silver trees:
Night glides slowly down hill ... down stream
Bringing a myriad star-twinkling dream....
Softly blow lightly
O twilight breeze
Scarcely bend slightly
O silver trees:
Night will spill sleep in your day weary eye
While a soft yellow moon steals down the sky....
Softly blow
Scarcely bend
So ...!
Lullaby....
The lingering light of the sun
Takes from the chalice of the valley
Its mist-perfume to wash the
Moon-face with rose.
In the pool at my feet the goldfishes drag their trains of brown
Which cleave it into parts that ceaselessly mingle anew.
The moon, silver bright
Through thousand streams sends her light
Into the valley aswoon, listening to the harmony of night.
Ah! to be able to sing,
To sorrow in melody;
To string with silver
Sorrow's dark harp!
Or, mount every thorn
Crowning life's brow
With lustrous stars--
Those tears of the sky.
Rolling down its face
When night's hand puts
Darkness's crown on its head
As twilight dies.
None of these, for my soul;
Only to weep is given to me,
To nourish my heart's crop
For the scythe of barrenness to reap.
Violet hills,
Rosy mist,
Limpid pool,
Golden notes from sunset's lute
For shadows
Draped in green
With purple feet
To dance and swim
Through irridescent undulatings.
Dusk descends;
Mauve cloudlets--
Dying butterflies--
Flit and fly and die
In the opalescent ocean of mist
That grows dark and still,
Kisses away the last gold
As the breeze falls asleep,
The brush of sunset
Draws the rosy cloud-scape
On the canvas of the sky;
The blue hills in repose
Listen to the pearl lullaby of the mist.
A song of dimming light, this,
And dance of shadows with silver feet,
For the joy of one shy star-maid
Seeking hiding from the moon
Behind the emerald screen of the sea.
Darkness comes out of the earth
And swallows dip into the pallor of the west;
From the hay comes the clamour of children's
mirth;
Wanes the old palimpsest.
The night-stock oozes scent,
And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by:
All that the worldly day has meant
Wastes like a lie.
The children have forsaken their play;
A single star in a veil of light
Glimmers: litter of day
Is gone from sight.
The houses fade in a melt of mist
Blotching the thick, soiled air
With reddish places that still resist
The Night's slow care.
The hopeless, wintry twilight fades,
The city corrodes out of sight
As the body corrodes when death invades
That citadel of delight.
Now verdigris smoulderings softly spread
Through the shroud of the town, as slow
Night-lights hither and thither shed
Their ghastly glow.
By the Isar, in the twilight
We were wandering and singing,
By the Isar, in the evening
We climbed the huntsman's ladder and sat swinging
In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes,
While river met with river, and the ringing
Of their pale-green glacier water filled the evening.
By the Isar, in the twilight
We found the dark wild roses
Hanging red at the river; and simmering
Frogs were singing, and over the river closes
Was savour of ice and of roses; and glimmering
Fear was abroad. We whispered: "No one knows us.
Let it be as the snake disposes
Here in this simmering marsh."
When you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?
Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields.
Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,
And little stars come rolling from their husk.
And all the earth is gone into a dust
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, pale with must,
And all the sky has withered and gone cold.
The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;
In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard
A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.
Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,
And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.
There are no birds,
And the goldenrod is gone.
And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;
And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper,
And all the world seems old!
Black with a batter of mud
Stippled with silvery pools
Stands the pavement at the street-end;
And the gutter snow is gone
From cobble and runnelling curb;
And no longer the ramping wind
Is rattling the rusty signs;
And moted and soft and misty
Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets,
And the home-bound crowds of the city
Walk in a flood of gold.
And suddenly out of the dusk
There comes the ancient question:
Can it be that I have lived
In earlier worlds unknown?
Or is it that somewhere deep
You stood alone
In the dusky window,
Watching the racing river.
Touched with a vague unrest,
And if tired of loving too much
More troubled at heart to find
That the flame of love could wither
And the wonder of love could pass,
You kneeled at the window-ledge
And stared through the black-topped maples
Where an April robin fluted,--
Stared idly out
At the flood-time sweep of the river,
Silver and paling gold
In the ghostly April twilight.
Shadowy there in the dusk