Shifting Scenes and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

When lo! from out a neighbouring copse,
With richest plumage sunny bright,
Making a wheel of coloured light,
A little bird, aflutter, drops
Down upon the pear-tree tops,
Hopping lightly,
Glancing brightly
'Mid the twisted, shadowy boughs,
Raining lightnings round his brows.

149

IV.

A glory and a wonder are
Its crested colours to the sight;
It shakes with music, as a star
Trembles with excess of light:
Round about its throat assemble
Blushes of the damask rose;
And a deepening violet goes
Sleeking down its back, atremble;
Rich and hazy flutterings
Glow about its yellow wings
Dancing golden in the light;
Like a crowd of singing sunbeams
Gleams the little vision bright.

V.

Tame it seems, too, as a bird
Born amid the tropics hushed,
Where no flower is ever crushed,
And no voice of man is heard;—
Nothing but a gorgeous noon,
And a silent silken river,
And an endless, endless June
Sinking down into a swoon,
Or a low and bulging moon
For ever and for ever.

150

VI.

Up among the twigs it ran,
Hopping, wheeling, full of graces;
'Mid the apples with the tan
Summering all their jocund faces;
When the monk, advancing near it,
Strove to touch it with his finger,
Scarcely seemed the bird to fear it,
Only, with a sidelong linger,
Hopped it on—a twig or two—
All its purples in a shiver,
Shaking like a ruffled river
In the storm of notes it blew.

VII.

All along the garden alleys,
Past the dial on the lawn,
Followed he the happy sallies
Of this creature of the dawn,
Out, into the solitude
Of the summer-haunted wood.

VIII.

Out, amid the stirless hush
Of the twilight shadows dun,
Glancing on, from bush to bush,
Glowing like a burning blush,

151

Followed he, with cheek aflush,
This gleaming creature of the sun:—
On about three hundred paces
From the cloister-garden door,
Joined he in the wheeling races,
Through the copse and open spaces—
Sudden summer on their faces
As the branches backward bore—
Just about three hundred paces
From the little Gothic door,
Just three hundred, and no more!

IX.

When, behold! a slope of sunbeams
Smote athwart the inner gloom,
Steeping all the fluttering plumage
In a ruddier golden bloom;
And the little bird went winging
Showering music down, like rain,
Up the slope of sunbeams, singing,
And he saw it not again!