The eager year
Is passing, with its triumphs and defeats.
Alike earth rests from labor and from joy;
Hushing each tiniest insect, wearing now
No careless ornament of flower or leaf;
Reaching her pleading arms up to the sky
In longing for its silent chrism of snow
In benediction; like a weary heart,
That worn with spent emotion, sinks at last
Into exhaustion that almost seems rest.
Not brooding over her lost violets,
High in her hands upon the leafless trees
She holds the woodbine, swaying in the wind,
A crimson rosary of remembered sins.
How shall we keep this solemn festival,
Thou, O my heart, and I? have we no sins
It would be well, confessing here to-night,
To know forgiven? Not to some gentle friend
Whose tenderness ere half the tale were told
Would silence it with kisses; but before
A more severe tribunal in my own
Exacting soul, that could endure no blot
Upon the scutcheon of its spotless truth.
Not without hope of pardon; for the soul
Is sponsor to the heart; if she can tell
Of purest purpose loftily upheld,
We need not be so sad, my heart and I,
To wear a little while upon our breast
The crimson rosary.
And when the soul
Shall speak at last the full “Absolvo te,”
Then will we lay forevermore aside
These memories of fault. Earth does not wear
Her scarlet woodbine all the year, to pain
Her beating heart with constant self-reproach.
Content with frank and full confession once,
The trembling vine, with sighing of the wind,
Drops slowly, one by one, its deep red leaves.
So having won forgiveness from myself,
Listening I hear the far-off harmonies
Of solemn chant in heaven: “Though thy sins
Had been as scarlet, they shall be like wool.”
God’s benediction calms my troubled heart,
Pained with its consciousness of frailty,
Even as upon the fading crimson leaves
Fall tenderly the first white flakes of snow.