University of Virginia Library

I knew a poet once, a lonely man,
Whose soul dwelt in the dim wood-glooms of thought
And dreamt strange visions of enchanted Spring:
Whose song, in that bright bloom-tide when the May
Quickens life's pulses and the summer lies,
Sun-weary, on the painted meadow-grass,
Was solemn, strange and sorrowful: scant trace
Was there of Spring-tide glory or the craze
Of ecstasy, that turns the air to wine,
When in the rose-hearts burns the July splendour.
What little joy there was was weird and still,
Stately and serious, with an undersong
That sounded like the night-bird's wailing notes
Or the quaint ripple of some low-voiced rill,
That murmurs of earth's hidden soul of pain
Under her robe of blooms; one heard in it
The chariot-thunder of the shrouded hours,
That swept across the autumn-verging skies.
But, in the winter, when the sky was clear
With silver frost and crystal-feathered snow
Fell softly through the air, when streamlets lay
Fast-locked in dreamless sleep, his soul bloomed out
To a new flow'rage and his song grew bright
With exquisite strange splendour. In the lines,
The ringing sweetness of bird-haunted woods
Replaced the crash of snow-enladen boughs:
The blooms ran wreathing o'er the broidered page:
One smelt the summer in his scented verse
And one eternal rose of cloudless sky
Glittered, from opal dawn to golden eve,
In the clear setting of his pictured words.
For why? He saw the complements of things
And knew how Nature's ever-changing pulse
Throbbed with strange secrets, how the flower of death
Bore at its heart the ovary of life.
He felt that winter held the germs of Spring
And summer's roses slept beneath the snow.
And so no joy was sorrowless to him,
No sorrow joyless, and his spheral life
Lay in the equipoise of perfect peace.

In the great city's crowded heart he dwelt
And all his life had passed there. Little he
Knew of the Spring-sweet glories of the May
Or of the rare deep magic of the time
When summer brims the jewel-chaliced flowers
With wine of wonder and the woods burst out
A-bloom with singing. Yet the flowers of May
Bloomed in the shaded woodlands of his soul
And in his heart a chastened glow of Spring
Lived ever. Life for him was sweet and calm,
The sweeter for a touch of pain in it,
As music saddens to its sweetest key;
And so he lived a kind of moonlight life,
Where all things remedied their opposites
And joy and pain were ever softened down
To the calm light of that Eternal Pearl
That Dante tells of in his “Paradise.”