Christmas Roses
O Ye laggard comers
Of the rosy summers!
Dear, delicious vagrants,
Hives of hoarded fragrance,
Through the golden
Days of balm and bloom, to open wide,
Wondering, dewy eyes at Christmas-tide!
Now that day grown chill is
Come the calla-lilies,
Lifting, row on row,
Hoods of scented snow-
Fit for holiest altar,
Psalm and psalter:
Vestal-nuns your courtly robes beside,
Truants of sunshine, waifs of summer-tide!
Welcome, joy’s sweet keepers!
Balmy little sleepers
Through the night and noon
Of your vanished June.
Glad the sky that thrills you,
Bird that trills you!
Fairer than to bridegroom comes the bride,
O sacred roses of the Christmas-tide!
Summer Past
Now the summer all is over!
We have wandered through the clover,
We have plucked in wood and lea
Blue-bell and anemone.
We ere children of the sun,
Very brown to look upon:
We were stained, hands and lips,
With the berries’ juicy tips.
And I think that we may know
Where the rankest nettles grow,
And where oak and ivy weave
Crimson glories to deceive.
Now the merry days are over!
Woodland-tenants seek their cover,
And the swallow leaves again
For his castle-nests in Spain.
Shut the door, and close the blind:
We shall have the bitter wind,
We shall have the dreary rain
Striving, driving at the pane.
Send the ruddy fire-light higher;
Draw your easy chair up nigher;
Through the winter, bleak and chill,
We may have our summer still.
Here are poems we may read,
Pleasant fancies to our need:
Ah, eternal summer-time,
Dwells within the poet’s rhyme!
All the birds’ sweet melodies
Linger in these songs of his;
And the blossoms of all ages
Waft their fragrance from his pages.
A Song Of The Summer Wind
Balmily, balmily, summer wind,
Sigh through the mountain-passes,
Over the sleep of the beautiful deep,
Over the woods’ green masses;
Ripple the grain of the valley and plain,
And the reeds and the river grasses!
How many songs, O summer wind,
How many songs you know,
Of fair, sweet things in your wanderings,
As over the earth you go-
To the Norland bare and bleak, from where
The red south roses blow.
Where the red south blossoms blow, O wind,
(Sing low to me, low and silly!)
And the golden green of the citrons lean
To the white of the saintly lily;
Where the sun-rays drowse in the orange-boughs,
(Sing, sing, for the heart grows chilly!)
And the belted bee hangs heavily
In rose and daffodilly.
I know a song, O summer wind,
A song of a willow-tree:
Soft as the sweep of its fringes deep
In languorous swoons of tropic noons,
But sad as sad can be!
Yet I would you might sing it, summer wind,
I would you might sing it me.
(O, tremulous, musical murmur of leaves!
O mystical melancholy
Of waves that call from the far sea-wall! -
Shall I render your meaning wholly
Ere the day shall wane to the night again,
And the stars come, slowly, slowly?)
I would you might sing me, summer wind,
A song of a little chamber:
Sing soft, sing low, how the roses grow
And the starry jasmines clamber;
Through the emerald rifts how the moonlight drifts,
And the sulight’s wellow amber.
Sing of a hand in the fluttering leaves,
Like a wee white bird in its nest;
Of a white hand twined in the leaves to find
A bloom for the fair young breast.
Sing of my love, my little love,
My snow-white dove in her nest,
As she looks through the fragrant jasmine leaves
Into the wasting west.
Tenderly. Tenderly, summer wind,
With murmurous word-caresses,
O, wind of the south, to her beautiful mouth
Did you cling with your balmy kisses-
Flutter and float o’er the white, white throat,
And ripple the golden tresses?
“The long year growth from green to gold, ”
Saith the song of the willow-tree;
“My tresses cover, my roots enfold.”
O, summer wind, sing it me!
Lorn and dreary, sad and weary,
As lovers that parted be___
But sweet as the grace of a fair young face
I never again may see!
