Ii

Here where the woods are wet, The blossoms of the dog’s-tooth violet Seem meteors in a miniature firmament Of wild-flowers, where, with rainy sound and scent Of breeze and blossom, dim the April went: Their tongue-like leaves of umber-mottled green, So thickly seen, Seem dropping words of gold, Inaudible syllables of a magic old. Beside them, near the wahoo-bush and haw, Blooms the hepatica; Its slender flowers upon swaying stems Lifting chaste, solitary blooms, Astral, and twilight-colored,--frail as gems That star the diadems Of elves and sylvans, piercing pale the glooms;-- Or like the wands, the torches of the fays, That link lone, leafy ways With slim, uncertain rays:-- (The faëry people, whom no eye may see, Busy, so legend says, With budding bough and leafing tree, The blossom’s heart o’ honey and honey-sack o’ the bee, And all dim thoughts and dreams, That take the form of flowers, as it seems, And haunt the banks of greenwood streams, Showing in every line and curve, Commensurate with our love, an intimacy, A smiling confidence or sweet reserve.)

There, at that leafy turn, Of trailered rocks, rise fronds of hart’s-tongue fern: Fronds that my fancy names Uncurling gleeds of emerald and gold, Whose feathering flames Were kindled in the musky mould, And now, as stealthy as the graying morn, Thorn upon woolly thorn, Build up, and silently unfold Faint, cool, green fires, that burn Uneagerly, and spread around An elfin light above the ground, Like that green, rayless glow A spirit, lamped with crystal, makes below In dripping caves of labyrinthine moss, Or grottoes of the weedy undertow.-- And in the underwoods, around them, toss The white-hearts with their penciled leaves, That, ’mid the shifting gleams and glooms, The interchanging shine and shade, Seem some soft garment made By visionary hands, that none perceives; Hands busy with invisible looms Of woodland shine and shade; a shadowy light, Whose figments interbraid, Carpeting the woods with colors and perfumes.-- Or, are they fragments left in flight, These flow’rs that scatter every glade With windy, rippling white, And breezy, fluttering blue, Of her wild gown that shone upon my sight, A moment, in the woods I wandered through? April’s, who fled this way? April, whom still I follow, Whom still my dreams pursue; Who leads me on by many a tangled clue Of loveliness, until in some green hollow, Born of her fragrance and her melody, But lovelier than herself and happier, too, Cradled in blossoms of the dogwood-tree, My soul shall see, White as a sunbeam in the heart of day, The infant, May.