Death in April

O MOTHER England, bow thy reverend head
This April morning. Over Northlands wan
Midspring comes back to freshen thee once more,
With daisies on the mounds of thy loved dead,
Like Chaucer’s benediction from the dawn,
Or his, ah me ! who down thy forest floor
Went yestereven. Now
In vain thou art regirdled, as alone
Of all the elder lands or younger thou
With hawthorn spray canst be, — that weariless
Eternal charm of thine, thou home of blown
Seafarers in the storm through dark and stress.

’T is spring once more upon the Cumner hills,
And the shy Cumner vales are sweet with rain,
With blossom, and with sun. The burden of time
By eerie woodland messengers fulfills
Our unremembered treasuries of pain
With long-lost tales of unforgotten prime ;
The stir of winds asleep,
Roaming the orchards through unlanguid hours,
Allures us to explore the vernal deep
And unhorizoned hush wherein we wend,
Yet always some elusive weird there lowers,
Haunting its uttermost cloud walls unkenned.

There skirt the dim outroads of April’s verge,—
Memorial of an elder age, — gray wraiths
Which went nowhither when the world was young,
Grim ghosts which haunt the marges of the surge
Of latest silence. Beaming sunshine bathes
The wanderers of life, and still among
The corners of the dawn
Lurk these dark exiles of the nether sea,
Unbanished, unrecalled from ages gone.
Disowned ideals, deeds, or Furies blind,
Or murdered selves, — I know not what they be,
Yet are they terrible though death be kind.

Companioned by the myriad hosts of eld,
We journey to a land beyond the sweep
Of knowledge to determine. Tented where
The storied heroes watch aforetime held,
We hold encampment for a night and sleep
Into the dawn ; till, restless, here and there
A sleeper, having dreamed
Of music, and the childhood sound of birds,
And the clear run of river heads which gleamed
Along his hither coming through the gloom,
Rouses from his late slumber, and upgirds
Him to look forth where the gold shadows loom.

Ah, Cumner, Cumner, where is morning now ?
A nightwatch did he bide with thee, but who
Hath his clear prime ? Perchance the great dead Names,
Wide bruited, shall restore thee him, if thou
His captive flight with ransom flowers pursue
And gleaming swallows down the glittering Thames
Where the long sea-winds go.
In vain, in vain ! To the hid wells of tears
In their hot waste thou canst not journey so,
Nor make leap up the old desire outworn;
For Corydon is dead these thousand years, —
Dear Corydon who died this April morn.

O mother April, mother of all dreams,
Child of remembrance, mother of regret,
Inheritor of silence and desire,
Who dost revisit now forsaken streams,
Canst thou, their spirit, evermore forget
How one sweet touch of immemorial fire
Erewhile did use to flush
The music of their wells, as sunset light
Is laid athwart the springtime with keen hush ?
Being so gracious and so loved, hast thou
In all thy realm no shelter from the night
Where Corydon may keep with Thyrsis now ?

Hast thou some far sequestering retreat
We can but measure by the pause and swing
Of old returning seasons filled with change ?
When far from this world, whither do thy feet
Lead thee upon the margins of the spring ?
Through what calm lulls of weather dost thou range
In smiling reverie,
Between the crisp of dawn and noon’s white glare ?
Beyond the borders of the wintry sea,
Remembering those who loved thy garment’s hem
As children love the oxeyes, dost thou there
Reserve a shadow of content for them ?

Belike some tender little grave-eyed boy,
Of mild regard and wistful, plaintive moods,
Fondling of earth, darling of God, too shy
For fellowship with comrades, finds employ
In undiscoverable solitudes
Of childhood, when the gravel paths are dry,
And the still noons grow long.
In the old garden’s nook of quiet sun,
Where brownies, elfin things, and sun motes throng,
He builds a hut of the half-brown fir boughs, —
Whose winter banking for the flowers is done, —
And there all day his royal fairy house

He keeps, with entertainment of such guests
As no man may bring home ; he peoples it
As never Homer peopled Troy with kings.
In the wide morning his unnamed behests
Strange foresters obey, while he doth sit
And murmur what his sparrow playmate sings
From the dark cedar hedge.
Twin tiny exiles from the vast outland,
They know the secret unrecorded pledge
Whereby the children of the dawn are told.
The toiling small red ants are his own band
Of servitors ; his minstrels from of old —

Light-hearted pillagers of golden shrines —
The bees were, in the willows ; row on row
Are his the tall white lilacs in the sun,
And his the stainless roof-work of the pines.
He in that wide unhaste heats to and fro,
Borne far a-wind as a poised bird might run,
Or as a sunburnt shard
Might gleam, washed over by the glimmering sea :
A mother hand hath still his doom in guard ;
The sparrow cadence and the lilac’s prime
Go build the soul up of a man to be,
While yet he kens them not, nor self, nor time.

O mother April, mother of all dreams,
In thy far dwelling keepest thou for him
Such hospitable bounty ? Hast thou there
A welcome of seclusion and sweet streams
Of sheer blue waters, at whose running brim.
Under the gold of that enchanted air,
Thy frail windflowers are spread ?
Crown with thy smile the end of his rare quest,
And cherish on thy knees that holiest head ;
Sweet mother, comfort his dear spirit now
With perfect calm, with long-abiding rest,
And that love thou canst tend him, — only thou!

April, 0 mother of all the dappled hours,
Restorer of lost days, for whom we long ;
Bringer of seedtime, of the flowers and birds ;
Sower of plenty, of the buds and showers;
Exalter of dumb hearts to the brink of song;
Revealer of blind Winter’s runic words!
Relief from losing strife
To him thou givest, and to us regret.
Wilt thou requicken ever there to life
Our dreams which troop across the burning Bills,
Or on some primal bleak windlands forget
Thy yearning children by their woodland rills ?

We muse and muse, and never quite forego
The sure belief in thy one home at last.
The years may drive us with dull toil and blind,
Till age bring down a covering like snow
Of many winters, yet the pausing blast
Hath rifts of quiet, and the frozen wind
Zones of remindful peace ;
Then, while some pale green twilight fades to gold,
There comes a change, and we have found release
In the old way at thy returning hands.
Forever in thy care we grow not old,
No barrows of the dead are in thy lands.

0 April, mother of desire and June,
Great angel of the sunshine and the rain,
Thou, only thou, canst evermore redeem
The world from bitter death, or quite retune
The morning with low sound wherein all pain
Bears part with incommunicable dream
And lisping undersong,
Above thy wood-banks of anemone.
A spirit goes before thee, and we long
In tears to follow where thy windways roam, —
Depart and traverse back the toiling sea,
Nor weary any more in alien home.

With what high favor hast thou rarely given
A springtime death as thy bestowal of bliss!
On Avon once thy tending hands laid by
The puppet robes, the curtained scenes were riven,
And the great prompter smiled at thy long kiss ;
And Corydon’s own master sleeps a-nigh
The stream of Rotha’s well,
Where thou didst bury him, thy dearest child ;
In one sweet year the Blessed Damozel
Beholds thee bring her lover, loved by thee,
Outworn for rest, whom no bright shore beguiled,
To voyage out across the gray North Sea ;

And slowly Assabet takes on her charm,
Since him she most did love thou hast withdrawn
Beyond the wellsprings of perpetual day.
And now 't is Laleham : from all noise and harm,
Blithe and boy-hearted, whither is he gone,
(Like them who fare in peace, knowing thy sway
Is over carls and kings,
He was too great to cease to be a child,
Too wise to be content with childish things,)
Having heard swing to the twin-leaved doors of gloom,
Pillared with autumn dust from out the wild,
And carved upon with BEAUTY and FOREDOOM ?

Awhile within the roaring iron house He toiled to thrill the bitter dark with cheer ;
But ever the earlier prime wrapped his white soul
In sure and flawless welfare of repose,
Kept like a rare Greek song through many a year
With Chian terebinth, — an illumined scroll
No injury can deface.
And men will toss his name from sea to sea
Along the wintry dusk a little space,
Till thou return with flight of swallow and sun
To weave for us the rain’s hoar tracery,
With blossom and dream unraveled and undone.

We joy in thy brief tarrying, and beyond,
The vanished road’s end lies engulfed in snow,
Far on the mountains of a bleak new morn.
Craving the light, yet of the dark more fond,
Abhorring and desiring do we go,—
A cruse of tears, and love with leaven of scorn,
Mingled for journey fare ;
While in the vision of a harvest land
We see thy river wind, and, looming there,
Death walk within thy shadow, proudly grim,
A little dust and sleep in his right hand, —
The withered windflowers of thy forest dim.