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A Song
UP the dewy slopes of morning | |
| Follow me; | |
| Every smoky spy-glass scorning, | |
| Look and see, look and see | |
| How the simple sun is rising, | 5 |
| Not approving nor despising | |
| You and me. | |
| Hear not those who bid you wait | |
| Till they find the sun’s birth-date, | |
| Preaching children, savage sages, | 10 |
| To their mouldy, blood-stuck pages | |
| And the quarrelling of ages, | |
| Leave them all; and come and see | |
| Just the little honied clover, | |
| As the winging music-bees | 15 |
| Come in busy twos and threes | |
| Humming over! | |
| All without a theory | |
| Quite successfully, you see; | |
| Little priests that wed the flowers, | 20 |
| Little preachers in their way, | |
| Through the sunny working day | |
| With their quite unconscious powers | |
| How they say their simple say. | |
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| What? a church-bell in the valley? | 25 |
| What? a wife-shriek in the alley? | |
| Tune the bell a little better, | |
| Help the woman bear her fetter. | |
| All in time! all in time! | |
| If you will but take your fill | 30 |
| Of the dawn-light on the hill, | |
| And behold the dew-gems glisten,— | |
| If you turn your soul to listen | |
| To the bees among the thyme. | |
| There may chance a notion to you | 35 |
| To encourage and renew you, | |
| For the doing and the speaking, | |
| Ere the jarring of the chime, | |
| And the mad despair of shrieking | |
| Call you downward to the mending | 40 |
| Of a folly, and the ending | |
| Of a crime. | |
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| On the dewy hill at morning | |
| Do you ask?—do you ask? | |
| How to tune the bells that jangle? | 45 |
| How to still the hearts that wrangle?— | |
| For a task? | |
| When the bell shall suit the ears | |
| Of the strong man’s hopes and fears, | |
| As the bee-wing suits the clover | 50 |
| And the clover suits the bee, | |
| Then the din shall all be over, | |
| And the woman shall be free, | |
| And the bell ring melody, | |
| Do you see?—do you see? | 55 |
| There are bees upon the hill, | |
| And the sun is climbing still, | |
| To his noon; | |
| Shall it not be pretty soon | |
| That the wife she shall be well, | 60 |
| And the jarring of the bell | |
| Falls in tune? | |
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