The Last Blackbird; And Other Lines (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " Only the sea !" Then Nature, rising, stood: " The chase is over; yon last bird is free. Before I give new beauty to the wood, How say'st thou, poet, to a wider sea ?" She looked above: small as a pigeon's wing A cloud came up and crost the blackbird's tree. She said, " How say'st thou if yon blackbird bring, To wash my world, a deeper, wider sea ?" I woke. A dizzy man I reeling went Round by the hill: a blackbird hurried by; Clouds raced and cracked; to some high argument Were hurrying the gossips of the sky. THE DOWN BY MOONLIGHT THE down looks new whose lonely slopes I climb, Yet is he old despite the dress he wears: Old as the dark and concreate with Time, Waste with the affliction of uncounted years. A weary head he stretches to the pale Of Heaven; one bended arm of him uprears A shaggy fist, as if to turn the hail And fire of tempest fraught with new distress For his old brow; and one arm seems to trail Its atrophied and bony nakedness Down to the streams that bless the living land, As if, to mitigate the loneliness, He too would reach, as we, another's hand. So quiet this hour is grown, a whisper's fall Were sacrilege; within me as I stand Shy wonder, waking, seems a common brawl, And even thought itself is over loud; Desire alone is dumb; no plover's call; And if owls fly, their flight is unavowed For cry I hear of theirs: peace here and far, And save the moon's loved presence one lit cloud Is sole 'twixt me and night's first listening star. HOLIDAY I WOKE to hear the song that early rang My boyhood on from Spring to fairer Spring, The song of wonder, new as when I sprang To its first note with boyish welcoming. O may its glory fail not from my sense Till Life?the Toll-bridge crost?unqu...