Page:Fugitive Poetry 1600-1878.djvu/165
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The Masque of The New Year.
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Crimson heath-bells making regal all the solitary places;Dominant light, that pierces down into the deep blue water spaces;Sun-uprisings, and sun-settings, and intensities of noon;Purple darkness of the midnight, and the glory of the moon;
Rapid, rosy-tinted lightnings, where the rocky clouds are riven,Like the lifting of a veil before the inner courts of heaven;Silver stars in azure evenings, slowly climbing up the steep;Cornfields ripening to the harvest, and the wide seas smooth with sleep.
Circled with those living splendours, Summer passed from out my sight;Like a dream that filled with beauty all the caverns of the night!And the vision and the presence into empty nothing ran—And the New Year was still older, and seemed now a youthful man.
III.
Autumn! Forth from glowing orchards stepped he gaily in a gownOf warm russet freaked with gold, and with a vision sunny brown;On his head a rural chaplet, wreathed with heavily drooping grapes,And broad shadow-casting vine leaves like the Bacchanalian shapes.
Fruits and berries rolled before him from the year's exhausted horn;Jets of wine went spinning upwards, and he held a sheaf of corn:And he laughed for very joy, and he danced from too much pleasure,And he sang old songs of harvest, and he quaffed a mighty measure.
But above this wild delight an overmastering graveness rose,And the fields and trees seemed thoughtful in their absolute repose:And I saw the woods consuming in a many-coloured death—Streaks of yellow flame down-deepening through the green that lingereth.
Sanguine flashes, like a sunset, and austerely shadowing brown;And I heard, within the silence, the nuts sharply rattling down:And I saw the long dark hedges all alight with scarlet fire,Where the berries, pulpy-ripe, had spread their bird-feasts on the briar.
I beheld the southern vineyards, and the hop-grounds of our land,Sending gusts of fragrance outwards, nearly to the salt sea strand;Saw the windy moors rejoicing in their tapestry of fern,And the stately weeds and rushes, that to dusty dryness turn.
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