Carol and Cadence :: :: University of Virginia Library

My songs, you are fledged now for flying:
Your wings on the bars
You beat, all impatient for trying
The flight to the stars.
Nay, go, since your soul-prison straits you,
The peace of your cage.
You know not, Heaven help you! what waits you
Without, in this sojourn of sighing,
This world-waste of dreaming and dying,
This weariful age.

Behold, you are free, may God greet you!
I have given you the keys of the air.
Will any one mark you and meet you
With love, for indeed you are fair?
I wonder, will any one know you
For gifts from on high?
Scant mercy, I fear, will most show you.
Belike they will evil entreat you,
Will strive in your flight to defeat you
And do you to die.

Yet where of grudge, lower 'gainst higher,
Except among men, was it heard?
In Nature no crawler hates flyer,
The toad, the snail, scorn not the bird.
Men only delight in waylaying
The birds of the soul;
Men only find pleasure in staying
The flight of their God-given pinions
And hindering Song's heaven-seeking minions
From gaining their goal.

This world is a turbulent tangle,
A jungle of sorrow and strife,
Where tiger and crocodile wrangle
With jackal and ape for dear life.
There's never a quarter of quiet
For songbirds like you;
And hard, hard it is from the riot
Of foes to escape that await you
And open, above these that hate you,
Your wings in the blue.

Yet be not disheartened, my ditties;
Yet hearts here and there are there found,
Where Love for an amulet writ is,
A charm 'gainst the ills that abound.
There, there shall you shelter and nest you,
As 'twere in a grove,
A harbour of refuge, and rest you,
In peace, till Hate's tempest be over
And Time, in his season, discover
The summer of Love.

Then, then, when the contest of living
And striving is over, at last,
When Heaven shall have healed with forgiving
The wounds of the weariful Past
And the flowers of the soul in Love's Springtime
Their fragrance distil,
Then come, shall you know, is your wingtime,
Shall peep from their bosoms that love you,
Shall soar in the sunshine above you
And sing there your fill.