Kentucky Poems. Cawein Madison Julius

each core

      Of crimson roses girdling her hips,

      Where each bud dreams and drips.

      Smoothing her blue-black hair, – where many a tusk

      Of iris flashes, – like the falchions' sheen

      Of Faery 'round blue banners of its Queen, —

      Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk,

      That haunts the spring, where all the moss is musk

      With footsteps of the flowers on the banks?

      Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks?

      Balm for each blade of grass: the Hours prepare

      A festival each weed's invited to.

      Each bee is drunken with the honied air:

      And all the air is eloquent with blue.

      The wet hay glitters, and the harvester

      Tinkles his scythe, – as twinkling as the dew, —

      That shall not spare

      Blossom or brier in its sweeping path;

      And, ere it cut one swath,

      Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare.

      What is the spice that haunts each glen and glade?

      A Dryad's lips, who slumbers in the shade?

      A Faun, who lets the heavy ivy-wreath

      Slip to his thigh as, reaching up, he pulls

      The chestnut blossoms in whole bosomfuls?

      A sylvan Spirit, whose sweet mouth doth breathe

      Her viewless presence near us, unafraid?

      Or troops of ghosts of blooms, that whitely wade

      The brook? whose wisdom knows no other song

      Than that the bird sings where it builds beneath