The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan :: :: University of Virginia Library

I wander forth this chill December dawn:
John Frost and all his elves are out, I see,
As busy as the elfin world can be,
Clothing a world asleep with fleecy lawn.
'Mid the deep silence of the evening hours
They glimmered duskly down in silent showers,
And featly have they laboured all night long,
Cheering their labour with a half-heard rhyme—
Low as the burthen of a milkmaid's song
When Echo moans it over hills of thyme.

There is a hush of music on the air—
The white-wing'd fays are faltering everywhere;
And here and there,
Made by a sudden mingling as they fall,
There comes a softer lullaby than all,
Swept in upon the universal prayer.
Mine eyes and heart are troubled with a motion
Of music like the moving waves of ocean,
When, out of hearing, o'er the harbour bars
They sigh toward the moon and jasper stars.
The tiny squadrons waver down and thicken,
Gathering numbers as they fly,
And nearing earth their thick-set ranks they quicken,
And swim in swarms to die!

But now the clouds are winnowëd away:
The sky above is gray as glass; below
The feeble twilight of the dreamy day
Nets the long landskip hush'd beneath the snow.
The arrowy frosts sting keenly as I stray
Along the rutted lane or broad highway,
Past wind-swept hedges sighing sharp and clear,
Where half the sweetly changeful year
The scented summer loves to gleam and glow.
The new-lain snowy carpet, ankle-deep,
Crumbles beneath my footsteps as I pass,
Revealing scanty blades of frozen grass;
On either side the chirping sparrows leap,
And here and there a robin, friendly now,
From naked bough to bough.
That snow-clad homestead in the river's arm
Is haunted with the noisy rooks that fly
Between its leafless beeches and the sky,
And hailing fast for yonder fallow farm,
A solitary crow is plunging by.
Light muffled winds arising high among
White mountains brooding in their winter rest,
Bear from the eastern winter to the West
The muttered diapason of a song
Made by the thunder on a mountain's breast.

The sun is hanging in a purple globe,
'Mid yellow mists that stir with silver breath;
The quiet landskip slumbers, white as death,
Amid its naked fields and woody wolds,
Wearing the winter as a stainless robe
Low-trailing in a fall of fleecy folds.
By pasture-gates the mottled cattle swarm,
Thick'ning the misty air, with piteous eyes
Fixed ever on the tempest-breeding skies,
And watch the lingering traces of the storm.
A feeble sunbeam kisses and illumes
Yon whitened spire that hints a hidden town,
And flickering for a space it darkens down
Above the silence of forgotten tombs.

I gain the shoulder of the woodland now,
A fledgling's flutter from a small hill's brow.
I see the hamlet, half a mile below,
With dripping gables and with crimson panes,
And watch the urchins in the narrow lanes
Below the school-house, shouting in the snow.
The whitened coach comes swiftly round the road
With horns to which a dozen hills reply,
And rattling onward with its laughing load,
Halts steaming at the little hostelry.
Hard by the lonely woodman pants and glows,
And, wrapt in leather stockings to the thigh,
Toils with an icicle beneath his nose.
In yonder field an idle farm-boy blows
His frozen fingers into tingling flame;
The gaunt old farmer, as he canters by,
Reins in to greet the country clowns by name;
That chestnut pony in the yellow fly
Draws the plump parson and his leaner dame.

I loiter down the road, and feel the ground
Like iron 'neath my heel; the windless air
Seems lying in a swound.
Frost follows in its path without a sound,
And plies his nimble fingers everywhere,
Under my eyelids and beneath my hair.
Yon mountain dons once more its helm of cloud,
The air grows dark and dim as if in wonder;
Once more the heaven is winnow'd, and the crowd
Of silken fays flock murmurously under
A sky that flutters like a wind-swept shroud.
Through gloomy dimbles, clad with new-fall'n snow,
Back to my little cottage home I go.
But once again I roam by field and flood,
Stung into heat where hoar-frosts melt and bite,
What time the fog-wrapt sun drops red as blood,
And Eve's white star is tingling into sight.