Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE HYACINTHS, by NORMAN ROWLAND GALE



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE HYACINTHS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Take the good ashplant; stuff the old grey cap
Last Line: Leap up with immortality in your breast!
Subject(s): Country Life; Spring


TAKE the good ashplant; stuff the old grey cap
Deep in your pocket. Now that breakfast's done,
Out to the field of clover by the gap,
And be accepted of the early sun!

See you that mass of oakland banked in peace
Beyond the poplar family on the right?
There shall you find a kingdom of release
From half a city's arrogance and spite.

Keep now the proper angel at your side
To touch the spirit to a heavenly mood,
That you may share, as something deified,
The sense of morning holiness in the wood.

Behold that pear-tree, edged with radiant sky,
Still as an Oread open-lipped in rest!
Tread softly, friend! The Enchanter must be nigh,
For me to feel such pathos in my breast.

Methinks, if we could linger in this place
Till fall the early veilings of the gloom,
At last might show the never-coming face
Of Him whose delicate temple is the bloom.

Now onward by the ploughman's narrow track
Across the field of growing bread, till there,
A hundred yards beyond the forester's stack,
The wood lies waiting with its drowsy air.

This lower part the honeysuckle loves,
Enwreathing hazels, climbing lofty trees
To show its golden horns to infant doves
And be a fragrant playmate for the breeze.

Next comes the clearing where, when April shakes
Her bosom free of bloom in forest and wold,
The falling of the primrose bounty makes
The oaks seem rooted in a soil of gold.

And next the clearing where, in middle May
(To think of them in sunshine!) can be found
This holy wood's miraculous display
Of hyacinths flooding half a mile of ground.

Yon path is best, as keeping back the sight;
For I would have this Mediterranean Sea
Of dark blue blossoming hurriedly delight
The friend who shall be drowned in it with me.

How often half a loveliness is lost
To those who search it by the easier way!
The common paths and eminences cost
A price the poet's heart would break to pay.

Behold them! Breathe them! Where amazed you stand
With quivering eyelids, often have I stood
To see a shipless ocean on dry land
Becalmed in May within a Warwickshire wood.

Here let us sit and play with perished time,
When gods were elbowing gods, and startled girls
Were gathered as sweet as clusters of the lime
To kiss the heroes webbed within their curls.

Retreat ten thousand years from all that now
Prevents the demi-god, till you with me
In fancy hear beneath a thornless bough
The bird that best remembers Arcady.

Forget each fallen star, believed by Youth
Too brilliant-born to dwindle from the sky;
The lies that in the domino of Truth
Persuaded us to let Reflection die.

Forget them all; then, musing here with me,
Awake the coloured pageantries of Greece,
And watch across this billowy breadth of sea
A shadowy Argo steering to the Fleece.

For who can link this beauty with the day
In which our doom compels us to lament
The broken limbs of gods upon the way
That ever draws us farther from content?

Not you, not I. Insensibly we use,
When face to face with loveliness such as this,
The fine-spun ropes of dreamihead, and choose
The crags that lead us back to Time's abyss.

Be fortunate travelling backward! Even reach,
As friend for friend desires, the limit of quest;
And, having glimpsed a sight too great for speech,
Leap up with immortality in your breast!





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