How does it come that now I go
Down ways made blue with bluets’ eyes?
Along the creek-road as the crow
With mocking laughter flies?
A wild bird beats a crippled wing
To lure me from its brush-built nest;
Then, like a brook, I hear it sing
Its wildwood happiest.
Beyond the orchard hills are dells
Of knee-deep huckleberries, white
With little bell-blooms, May-time swells
With sweetness and delight.
The faun wakes in me, wild and keen,
And, with the joy the rathe months hold,
Kicks happy heels in deeps of green
And rolls in deeper gold.
My Shakespeare falls: I wake: and frost
And ice seam every flower-bed:
Where once each stalk, an Edgar, tossed,
Poor Tom now shakes instead.
Where once th’ gladiole, gleaming, shook
A wand of folly at the sun,
The humped stock hath a withered look—
The poor, pale Fool is done.
A great, gray beard the rose-bush hath,—
An old king’s,—where hangs many a tear,
Near the dead lily by the path—
Cordelia and Lear.