On a Midsummer Eve

I idly cut a parsley stalk,

And blew therein towards the moon;

I had not thought what ghosts would walk

With shivering footsteps to my tune.

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand

As if to drink, into the brook,

And a faint figure seemed to stand

Above me, with the bygone look.

I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice,

I thought not what my words might be;

There came into my ear a voice

That turned a tenderer verse for me.

On a discovered curl of hair

When your soft welcomings were said,

This curl was waving on your head,

And when we walked where breakers dinned

It sported in the sun and wind,

And when I had won your words of grace

It brushed and clung about my face.

Then, to abate the misery

Of absentness, you gave it me.

Where are its fellows now?  Ah, they

For brightest brown have donned a gray,

And gone into a caverned ark,

Ever unopened, always dark!

Yet this one curl, untouched of time,

Beams with live brown as in its prime,

So that it seems I even could now

Restore it to the living brow

By bearing down the western road

Till I had reached your old abode.

February 1913.

The Schreckhorn

(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)

(June 1897)

  

Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;

Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams

Upon my nearing vision, less it seems

A looming Alp-height than a guise of him

Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,

Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,

Of semblance to his personality

In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,

Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,

And the eternal essence of his mind

Enter this silent adamantine shape,

And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows

When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?