Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO THE LAKES, by WILLIAM WILFRED CAMPBELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO THE LAKES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: With purple glow at even
Last Line: The haunted hours go by.
Alternate Author Name(s): Campbell, W. W.
Subject(s): Lakes; Pools; Ponds


WITH purple glow at even,
With crimson waves at dawn,
Cool bending blue of heaven,
O blue lakes pulsing on;
Lone haunts of wilding creatures dead to wrong;
Your trance of mystic beauty
Is wove into my song.

I know no gladder dreaming
In all the haunts of men,
I know no silent seeming
Like to your shore and fen;
No world of restful beauty like your world
Of curved shores and waters,
In sunlight vapors furled.

I pass and repass under
Your depths of peaceful blue;
You dream your wild, hushed wonder
Mine aching heart into;
And all the care and unrest pass away
Like night's gray, haunted shadows
At the red birth of day.

You lie in moon-white splendor
Beneath the northern sky,
Your voices soft and tender
In dream-worlds fade and die,
In whispering beaches, haunted bays and capes,
Where mists of dawn and midnight
Drift past in spectral shapes.

Beside your far north beaches
Comes late the quickening spring;
With soft, voluptuous speeches
The summer, lingering,
Fans with hot winds your breast so still and wide,
Where June, with tranced silence,
Drifts over shore and tide.

Beneath great crags the larches,
By some lone, northern bay,
Bend, as the strong wind marches
Out of the dull, north day,
Horning along the borders of the night,
With iced, chopping waters
Out in the shivering light.

Here the white winter's fingers
Tip with dull fires the dawn,
Where the pale morning lingers
By stretches bleak and wan;
Kindling the iced capes with heatless glow,
That renders cold and colder
Lone waters, rocks and snow.

Here in the glad September,
When all the woods are red
And gold, and hearts remember
The long days that are dead;
And all the world is mantled in a haze;
And the wind, a mad musician,
Melodious makes the days;

And the nights are still, and slumber
Holds all the frosty ground,
And the white stars whose number
In God's great books are found,
Gird with pale flames the spangled, frosty sky;
By white, moon-curved beaches
The haunted hours go by.





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