Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SPRING FANTASIES: 3. THE SYMBOL, by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SPRING FANTASIES: 3. THE SYMBOL, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: What is the symbol underneath it all
Last Line: Is certified by joy and love and peace.
Subject(s): Dreams; Hearts; Love; Memory; Nature; Peace; Nightmares


WHAT is the symbol underneath it all,
The secret message of the throb of things:
The flower tossings and the whirl of wings,
The glow and scent when June makes carnival?
'Tis like a loved lost word of some old speech
Man has forgotten yet can almost reach.

Listen! The sap doth murmur it, the rain
Chants it in sibilant monotone, the breeze
Lifting a voice among the fluttered trees,
Takes up the song, repeats it once again;
And all the movement in the summer grass
Seems pulsing to express it ere it pass.

Ever and alway, iterant and low,
The whisper and the hint, the half-untold
Suggestion that is as the ages old,
Yet fresh-faced now as in the long ago:
"Seek, ye shall find, for you and I are one,
Bound each to other since the years begun.

"You hear the call of kinship in my voice,
My very breathing makes me part of you;
The gifts I offer are a residue
Of your inheritance and natural choice;
Man is not man who hath not eye to see
My luminous gloss on Nature's mystery.

"Rich-languaged, fraught with memories and dreams,
I lure you back in sacred moments when
You learn, oblivious to the lore of men,
The lesson of the forests, fields and streams;
Deep at my heart, deeper than all my mirth,
The ever-eloquent meaning of the earth."

In syllables of beauty, yea, with words
That move like music through the summer ways,
Nature doth speak, and in her every phrase, --
The choiring rivers and the lyric birds, --
She draws us from false gods, and our release
Is certified by joy and love and peace.





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