University of Virginia Library

[The liquid note of the thrush—what words can describe it]

The liquid note of the thrush—what words can describe it?
Above me now I hear it, dropping its globéd harmony,
Golden-bubbled, crystalline clear, indescribably deep.
Questioningly, answeringly its music falls,
Notes of antiphonal gold,
Full of youth and joy;
A tree-spirit, seemingly,
Voicing the innocence, the exuberance, the beauty of invisible,
Inviolable things; wild myths that populate
The world of the woods and streams.
Pensively, hopefully now it pleads,
Pleads for the dreams that haunt the hearts of the trees,
The soul of the woodland—
Dreams that it sees from its leafy height,
Its breezy eyrie of green,
Dreams that it sees and knows.
And now for me its music, too, takes form,
Visible, material form:
And I seem to see—
A presence, young with the youth that never ages,
A Faun, a Spirit, slender and naked as Spring,
Deep in the forest, approaching and now retreating,
Blowing his flute of flowers,
Gleaming, vanishing far in the verdurous glooms:
A Spirit, happy with all that is happy,
Communicated joy of all that is beauty,
The wild, wild beauty it drew from the breasts of its mother,
Its beautiful mother, Nature:
A phantom supernal in loveliness, responsive and tender,
Diaphanous, hyaline, translucently green and golden,
Golden and green like the sound of a thrush's fluting:
A form of light like that which shimmers and shades
Under the day-deep boughs of the myriad beeches;
Flitting, wavering now like a joy that dances,
Silent, alone in the heart of the forest,
Shimmering, glimmering here like the ray that stars the ripples,
Sun-speared, flashing and fading on woodland waters,
Falling, calling, foamy-lipped, like a Naiad,
Lost in the leaves, the remotest deeps of the forest.
Like the rain that tips the point of a poplar leaf,
Trembling, a liquid star, to its twinkling fall,
There it glances and glints, tinkling with silver the silence;
There it hazes like heat that haunts the summer meadows,
To whose kisses the wildflowers open their wondering and fragrant eyes:
A glimmering form it leads me, musical ever of motion,
From wildwood place to place,
Retreating, advancing, luring from vista to vista,
Far and far in the forest, the haunted deeps of the forest,
To slay me there, perhaps, at last,
At last with some last, long and lovelier note,
Ringing as gold
And deeper in magic than the myths of old.