The Poetical Works of John Payne :: :: University of Virginia Library

Since the writing (in March last) of this poem, my little Angora cat “Rover,” mentioned in v. 2, has died in her tenth year, to the infinite regret of all who knew her. She was the most loving and engaging of little creatures, far more intelligent than the majority of human beings, and was less to be described as a cat than as half-a-dozen pounds of affection and devotion done up in tabby fluff. Peace to her gentle memory! As Burton says, in the delightful “We and our Neighbours,” (one of the series of homely masterpieces by which the late Mrs. Beecher Stowe well-nigh atoned for her terrible political and literary crime of “Uncle Tom's Cabin”) “One's pets will die, and it breaks one's heart.”

OUT in my little garden
The crocus is a-flame;
The hyacinth-buds harden;
The birds no more are tame;
No more are they the same
That, in the sad snow-season,
Their Kyrie Eleison
Sang at my window-frame;
Lark, linnet, throstle, ousel,
With carol and carousal
For food to me that came.

318

The winter's woes are over;
My cats upon the wall,
Gruff, Top, Shireen and Rover,
Are basking one and all.
Soon will the cuckoo call
His “Summer, summer's coming!”
Soon will the bees be humming
About the tulips tall.
The lilac-buds are breaking;
A new blithe world is waking,
To gladden great and small.

I look on all things' gladness,
Half-gladdened, half opprest,
Delight at once and sadness
Debate it in my breast.
From out their winter's nest
My thoughts peep out at Springtime,
Misdoubting of their wing-time,
If sleep or wake be best;
For in me are two voices,
Whereof the one rejoices,
The other sighs for rest.

I know the old Spring story,
That stirs in every flower;
How Life grows never hoary,
But sleeps to gather power;
Then, with some passing shower,
Its face it laves from slumber
And casting off sleep's cumber,
Blooms forth in field and bower,
Unresting, still renewing,
For evermore ensuing
The ever-fleeting hour.

319

Ah Spring, thou tell'st me ever
The same contentless tale,
How spirit may not sever
Fore'er from body frail,
How, though the old forms fail,
In others yet imprisoned,
The soul, anew bedizened
With webs of joy and wail,
Still from the future's pages
Must spell, through endless ages,
Life's script of weal and bale.

I cannot dight my dreaming
To fit thy frolic glee;
Thy sweet, thy simple seeming,
Thine eager ecstasy
Are dulled with doubt for me.
I, who am heavy-hearted
For days and hopes departed,
I cannot joy with thee,
Unthoughtful, for the present,
Because to-day is pleasant,
Of Past and of To-be.

Yet, who shall still go glooming,
When Spring is on the stair,
When every bough is blooming
And every field is fair?
I stand in the soft air
And watch the grasses growing
And feel the March-breeze blowing
Away my winter's care.
A peace, as of sunsetting,
Is on me, a forgetting
Of joys and griefs that were.

320

This is the Springtide's magic:
Needs must, when April's nigh,
Its mask of winter tragic
The hardest heart lay by;
Beneath its watchet sky
The saddest soul despairing,
The coldest thought leave caring
To question how or why;
Content, while each day's bringing
New birds, new blossoms springing,
To live and not to die.