| |
| OFT have I seen you, lovely as of old | |
| Though Winter still forbade your birds to sing, | |
| Steal by the silent houses barred to cold, | |
| Around a sunlit corner vanishing. | |
| With hooded face and mantle gray, few know | 5 |
| How in these peopled days you pass | |
| With hesitant comings, hastenings away, | |
| Through every street, by every stretch of grass, | |
| From wood to distant wood, where’er you go, | |
| To gaze upon some frozen spot | 10 |
| And bid the frost depart, | |
| Of many a gentle thing to feel the heart, | |
| Judging the days before that pulse shall leap | |
| Fresh out of sleep, | |
| Sudden awake | 15 |
| To glow and merrymake | |
| In tune with the gay measure of its lot. | |
| |
| So have I waited long today, for sure | |
| This happy sun, this wealth of southern air, | |
| This desolation made by sleep more pure, | 20 |
| This emptiness, will tempt you forth to fare | |
| And earth will wake once more. | |
| Now is the first sweet respite of the year; | |
| Too long, too long have you been stranger here— | |
| Too long you tarry now—so soon before | 25 |
| New storms with freshened force will rage; | |
| O Spring, what keeps you now! | |
| When every tree, when every naked bough | |
| Needs your assurance, when all spent things wait | |
| In fear which but your coming would assuage:— | 30 |
| Spring, Spring—be not too late! | |
| The trodden soil conceals no trace of you | |
| Whose footprint I could tell in any place. | |
| And yet, methought that maid with raiment blue | |
| Who fled so fast, had a familiar face— | 35 |
| Some look of youth the Winter failed to heed | |
| Perhaps; and now yon sapling is more green. | |
| What laughter is it, from what source unseen | |
| Came that low mocking shout? Behold a steed | |
| Leaps as if happy to be driven | 40 |
| Along the winged way! | |
| Oh, am I mad or did his driver gay | |
| Lean from that dirty cart to wave farewell— | |
| A finger to her lips as warning given | |
| Lest I her secret tell? | 45 |
| |
| Across wet meadows where the wild thyme sleeps, | |
| Where lonely pools are forming in the sedge, | |
| I fain would track you past the ice-hung steeps | |
| Along the sinuous river’s melting edge, | |
| To where alone there is a little hollow. | 50 |
| A slender streamlet trickles from the ground, | |
| And stooping over it you gaze around | |
| To see what charmed thing perchance may follow. | |
| There kneeling on the early mud | |
| At last, O Spring, at last, | 55 |
| Would I might come upon you silently!— | |
| My arm about your shivering shoulders passed, | |
| My hand beneath the head thrown back for me, | |
| For me the breast a-flower in every bud,— | |
| The eyes of ecstasy! | 60 |
| |
| Why must your journey in such desperate haste | |
| Without another curious glance behind? | |
| There is a promise in this barren waste, | |
| And from that southern way you went the wind | |
| Brings an old fragrance back to things bereft | 65 |
| Of all old fragrances. Alas, too soon | |
| Fall the long shadows of the afternoon. | |
| With fingers deft | |
| Dusk lights the stars in heaven’s pale gulf of blue. | |
| Where, where are you | 70 |
| Who should on earth make the sky’s vision true? | |
| Now, even, have you sought that couch you left, | |
| Where, when clouds ominously rise, | |
| Dreaming, you may forget | |
| How late will bloom the timid violet? | 75 |
| Or on some quiet height, perhaps, you stand— | |
| To view afar, with passion-laden eyes, | |
| The desolated land. | |
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