Poems (Spofford)/A Flower Piece
A FLOWER PIECE.
Wandering of late beside a northern shoreThat longed for summer, and the wild beach grass,And dip of oar, and plash of pearly feet,And happy laughter on its lonely sands,I heard a young voice caroling some song,Nor knew I was in elf-land while I heard.It sang, and slowly trembled into rest—Slowly, because the earth was loth to leaveThe high melodious dalliance.The high melodious dalliance.But beforeThe singing fled to silence, eagerlyA rustle and a rush of flying wings,Like leaflets blown before a frosty blastWhen woods stand shivering, caught and bore it off,Lost in the airy clamor of their flight.And, as they went, wild music followed them;The tune the breeze winds in and out the grass, The tune to which the clouds and sunshine playO'er slopes of blushing clover—faint at first,With many a fluttered echo frolicking,It fell its windy way—then loitered down,With lingering cadence of a long delay,Lightly as in the tenderest deeps of evenThe yellow blossom of the new moon dropsBelow the west that waits it.Below the west that waits it.'Twas the voiceOf all the elves of all the flowers that blow,Flocking to find the Spring, who slumbered yet,Nursed by the blue-eyed April. Willow plumes,Harebell, and cowslip, and anemone;The silver cinquefoil, and the columbineThat bursts, a lance of hoarded light, from earth,And swings its red flame on the shining tip;The purple vetches, washed by salt sea sprays;The frail convolvulus, that, ere the yearIs at the flood, leagues with the building bird, And the rude way-side tangles o'er her nest.Precious to plot and pleachéd alley, too,The mimic nun of the snow-drop, and the friarDwelling within the hooded aconite;The maidens of the pale chrysanthemum,The royal lady of the proud and fairJaponica, and ev'n the merry mites'That balance on the trumpet-flower's edge,Tippling their horns of honey. And with them,All the delightsome things of old romance—The royal violet, and Sappho's rose;The fleur-de-lis, the flower of chivalry;The lotus, born of the eternities,Holding immortal ichor—hovered there,Hovered a moment, chiming in one strain,Then falling, failing, ever on the wing,Sought other skies.Sought other skies.And I, upon the shore,Watched a far bark into a bank of mist,A dim blue bank built up along the sea;The bark still sailing, hull and tapering spireA line of light, silverly sheathed about With deepening vapors, slowly gliding onTo denser shadow, slow and ever slower,Fainting and fading, till a phantom craftWas hid in sad recesses of the cloud,A vanished apparition—and above,Upon the pallor of a peaceful sky,Fair Hesper, like a flower, bloomed out heaven.