 | The poems of Madison Cawein |  |
450
THE FOREST SPRING
Push back the brambles, berry-blue;
The hollowed spring is full in view:
Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern
Ripples its rock-embedded urn.
The hollowed spring is full in view:
Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern
Ripples its rock-embedded urn.
Not for the loneliness that keeps
The coigne wherein its crystal sleeps;
Not for wild butterflies that sway
Their pansy pinions all the day
Above its mirror; nor the bee,
Nor dragon-fly, that, passing, see
Themselves reflected in its spar;
Not for the one white liquid star
That twinkles in its firmament;
Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent
Athwart it when the kindly night
Beads its long grasses with the light
Small jewels of the dimpled dew:
Not for the day's inverted blue,
Nor the quaint, dimly colored stones
That dance within it where it moans;
Not for all these I love to sit
In silence and to gaze in it.
But, lo! a nymph with merry eyes
Greets mine within its laughing skies;
A glimmering, shimmering nymph who plays
All the long fragrant summer days
With instant sights of bees and birds,
And talks with them in water-words;
And for whose nakedness the air
Weaves moony mists; and on whose hair,
Unfilleted, the night will set
That lone star as a coronet.
The coigne wherein its crystal sleeps;
Not for wild butterflies that sway
Their pansy pinions all the day
Above its mirror; nor the bee,
Nor dragon-fly, that, passing, see
Themselves reflected in its spar;
Not for the one white liquid star
That twinkles in its firmament;
Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent
Athwart it when the kindly night
Beads its long grasses with the light
Small jewels of the dimpled dew:
Not for the day's inverted blue,
Nor the quaint, dimly colored stones
That dance within it where it moans;
451
In silence and to gaze in it.
But, lo! a nymph with merry eyes
Greets mine within its laughing skies;
A glimmering, shimmering nymph who plays
All the long fragrant summer days
With instant sights of bees and birds,
And talks with them in water-words;
And for whose nakedness the air
Weaves moony mists; and on whose hair,
Unfilleted, the night will set
That lone star as a coronet.
| The poems of Madison Cawein | |