Malediction

Thrush, across the twilight
Here in the abbey close,
Pouring from your lilac-bough
Note on pebbled note,
Why do you sing so,
Making your song so bright.
Swelling to a throbbing curve
That brave little throat?
Soon, but a season brief,
The lice among your feathers,
Stiff-winged and aimless-eyed,
With song dead you shall fall;
Refuse of some clotted ditch,
Seeking no more berries;
Why with lyric numbers now
Do you the twilight call?
Proud in your tawny plumes
Mottled in devising,
Singing as though never sang
Bird in close till now —
Sharp are the javelins
Of death that are seeking,
Seeking even simple birds
On a lilac-bough.
Crushed, forlorn, a frozen thing,
For no more nesting,
For no more speckled eggs
In pattered cup of clay, —
Soon your song shall come to this
You who make the twilight yours,
And echoes of the abbey,
At the end of day.
In the song I hear it,
The thud of a poor feathered death,
In the swelling throat I see
The splintering of song —
What demon then has worked in me
To tease my brain to bitterness —
In me who have loved bird and tree
So long, so long?
Until I come to charity,
Until I find peace again,
My curse upon the fiend or god
That will not let me hear
A bird in song upon the bough
But, hovering about the notes,
There chimes the maniac beating
Of black-winged fear.

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Spectral

What will the years tell?
Hush! If it would but speak —
That shadow athwart the stream,
In the gloom of a dream;
Could my brain but spell
The thought in the brain of that weak
Old ghost that hides in the gloom,
Over there, of the chestnut bloom.
I sit in the broad June light
On the open bank of the river,
In the summer of manhood, young;
And over the water bright
Is a lair that is overhung
With coned pink blooms that quiver
And droop, till the water's breast
Is of petal and leaf caressed.
And the June sky glares on my prime —
But there in the gloom, with Time,
Huddled, with Time on its back,
Is a shadow that is my wrack.
Yes, it is I in the lair,
Peering and watching me there.
Under the chestnut bloom
My old age hides in the gloom.
And the years to be have been,
Could I spell the lore of that brain.
But the river flows between,
Over the weeds of pain,
Over the snares of death,
Maybe, should I leap to hold,
With myself grown old,
Council there in the gloom
Under the chestnut bloom.
And so, with instruction none,
I go, and leave it there,
My ghost with Time in its lair,
And the things that must yet be done
Tear at my heart unknown,
And the years have tongues of stone
With no syllable to make
For consolation's sake.
But peradventure yet
I shall return
To dare the weeds of death,
And plunge through the coned pink bloom,
And cry on that spectre set
In its silent ring of gloom,
And stay my youth to learn
The thing that my old age saith.

Cartwheeling figures silhouetted

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