ALL night, since that rich farewell of the sun, The weedy shores of this unchristened lake Have heard thy daring laughter; all night long Wild echoes with their fading strength have run Over the sounding rock and muffling brake, A maddened and incorrigible throng That seek the woodland's silence to destroy; Until that sylvan spirit of content Is angered at thy mockery of joy While Night is at her starry sacrament. In this august cathedral, where no jest Disturbs the holy anthem of the pine Or those low wind-sonatas of the leaf, Thy cry is like an uninvited guest Who soils the rubric and invades the shrine With some profaning word of unbelief. What bold derision goads thee to this mirth? Rue of the endless silence or high scorn For those dull souls that crowd one rood of earth: Pale amours from the twilight to the morn? Or art thou some old mortal here set free To mock the trite conventions until doom With that erosive satire which destroys? The servile as of yore, with bended knee, Curl to the purple princes and make room For dupes that move like masquerading toys. From sullen wombs of women still outflow Choice morsels for the lusty lips of war; The drums blind reason: youth will rise and go To mock that travail which their mothers bore. Shallow is grief that weeping can subdue; And wintry is the woe that refuge takes In silence or in laughter; in thy call Some sorrow of dead years dost thou pursue Across the choric marshes of these lakes, Or shadowed by some shoreland's granite wall? Is one who mixed her beauty with cold lies The maiden of thy scorn? I laugh with thee -- Last victim of the falsehood in her eyes, Last sad receiver of her treachery. Ease thou my soul, O prophet of the wild! The copper moon is heavy in the reeds That fan it slowly upward to the sky -- And all the wood is guileless as a child; Wan is the air with ghosts of feathered seeds That will not let the soul of summer die. But who of men shall heed this loveliness, Or who shall hear this pleasant night's refrain! The rose in vain puts on her crimson dress, In vain is poured the cooling cup of rain. To-night, like gloomy scythes, the raven wings Of some avenging hawk mow down the light That tethers this dark planet to the moon; The whip-poor-will from deep retirement brings Her lyrics to the archives of the night, Stored well with many an unremembered rune, And sighs of lovers dead a thousand years And stars that fell when Hesperus was young And all those cold, imperishable tears Forgotten in the darkness and unsung. Cool are the ages with these night-born tears That feed the dark Cocytus with their flow; And, richer for this weeping, men go on. And some return as bards and some as seers; And some, like thee, release their flood of woe In laughter through the darkness to the dawn. And I, as one old grief invades my heart With all her sad attendants in a throng, Command my lamentations to depart Along this easeful avenue of song. |