While the Oriole Sings

THERE is a bird that comes and sings
In the Professor’s garden-trees;
Upon the English oak he swings
And tilts and tosses in the breeze.

I know his name, I know his note,
That so with rapture takes my soul;
Like flame the gold beneath his throat,
His glossy cope is black as coal.

O oriole, it is the song
You sang me from the cottonwood,
Too young to feel that I was young,
Too glad to guess if life were good.

And while I hark, before my door,
Adown the dusty Concord road,
The blue Miami flows once more
As by the cottonwood it flowed.

And on the bank that rises steep
And pours a thousand tiny rills,
From loss and absence laugh and leap
My school-mates to their flutter-mills.

The blackbirds jangle in the tops
Of hoary-antlered sycamores;
The timorous killdeer starts and stops
Among the drift-wood on the shores.

Below, the bridge — a noonday fear
Of dust and shadow shot with sun —
Stretches its gloom from pier to pier,
Unto strange coasts, unknown, or won

Only by daring more than mine
Of older boys that breast the tide:
Dimly their slim, white bodies shine
Far over from the other side ;

And on those alien coasts, above,
Where silver ripples break the stream’s
Long blue, from some roof-sheltering grove
A hidden parrot scolds and screams. . .

Ah, nothing, nothing! Commonest things:
A touch, a glimpse, a sound, a breath —
But in the song the oriole sings
Lives a lost world that knew not death:

The world we somehow hope at last —
So the heart juggles with the brain —
We shall find somewhere, and the past
Forever make our own again.