The Comrades :: :: University of Virginia Library

The birches of your London square
“Have leafed into an emerald haze”?
Then come—you promised; come and share
The fuller spring of our last April days.
The ash, who wastes whole golden weeks in doubt,
The very ash is long since out;
The apple-boughs are muffled—do but think!—
With crowded bloom of maid's blush, white and pink;
The whins are all ablaze!

Picture the pigeons tumbling high in air!
Fancy the jet-eyed squirrel on the bough!

Leave the poor birches in your London square;
The spring and we await you here, and now.

Beneath our old world thatch your pulse shall beat
To the large-leisured rhythm of woodland ease;
No feverish hurry haunts our otiose trees;
Your slumber shall be sweet.

The little brown bird's nest,
The four blue eggs beneath the patient breast,
The lambkin's baby face,
The joy of liquid air
And azure space—
Are these not better than your dingy square,
Your mazes of inhospitable stone,
Your crowds who cannot call their souls their own,
Your Dance of Life-in-death?
Come to the fields, where Toil draws wholesome breath,
And Indigence still keeps her apron white.

Enough that you arrive too late to hear
The migrants in the night!

When wild March winds have dropt, and all is still,
A spirit-touch unseals the dreaming eyes;
One starts, and, leaning from the window-sill,
Catches the liquid notes, heard fine and clear
In hushed dark skies.

How pleasant had it been to watch with you,
Day after day,
The fairy flowering of the hawthorn spray!
Each thorn upon the stem
Protects one rose-tipped, green-and-golden gem;
A bud, a thorn!—'tis thus the whole tree through.
No,—where in tender shoots the branches end
There is no spear!
But bud and bud and bud are crowded here;
'Tis Nature's cue
To lavish most what least she can defend.

Come to the woods and see
How in the warm wet sunny mist of morn
Green leaves, like thoughts in dreamful hours, are born,
And in the mist birds pipe on every tree.
Come, and the mossy boulder on the hill

Shall teach what beauty springs of sitting still.
The world's work! Is the life not more than meat?
And is your shrill immitigable strife,
Your agony of existence, life?

The good earth calls with voices strangely sweet;
Come to your mother earth—th' old English earth,
The ruddy mother of a mighty race—
Dear ruddy earth, with early wheat
Pale green on plough ridge and with kindly grass
New sprung in fields that take no care!
Come to the friends who love your eager face;
Come share our rustic peace, our frugal mirth;
Come, and restrict for once your happy Muse
To the four hundred words we yokels use
For life and love and death—why, all the lore
Of ancient Egypt hardly needed more!
Will London miss her poet? There, alas!
No man is missed. Come make our roof your own,
And leave the birches dreaming in your square
Of forests far beyond the maze of stone.