In the Wet Woods

HERE where the woods are wet,
The blossoms of the dog’s-tooth violet
Seem meteors in a miniature firmament
Of wildflowers, where, with rainy sound and scent
Of breeze and blossom, soft the April went:
Their tongue-like leaves of umber-mottled green,
So thickly seen,
Seem dropping words of gold,
The visible syllables of a magic old.
Beside them, near the wahoo-bush and haw,
Blooms the hepatica;
Its slender flowers upon swaying stems
Lifting pale, solitary blooms,
Starry, and twilight-colored, — like frail gems,
That star the diadems
Of sylvan spirits, piercing pale the glooms; —
Or like the wands, the torches of the fays,
That light lone, woodland ways
With slim, uncertain rays: —
(The faery people, whom no eye may see,
Busy, so legend says,
With budding bough and leafing tree,
The blossom’s heart o’ honey and honey-sack o’ the bee,
And all dim thoughts and dreams,
That take the form of flowers, as it seems,
And haunt the banks of greenwood streams,
Showing in every line and curve,
Commensurate with our love, and intimacy,
A smiling confidence or sweet reserve.)

There at that leafy turn
Of trailered rocks, rise fronds of hart’s-tongue fern:
Fronds that my fancy names
Uncoiling flames
Of feathering emerald and gold,
That, kindled in the musky mould,
Now, stealthy as the morn, unfold
Their cool green fires that burn
Uneagerly, and spread around
An elfin light above the ground,
Like that green glow,
A spirit, lamped with crystal, makes below
In dripping caves of labyrinthine moss.
And in the underwoods, around them, toss

The white-hearts with their penciled leaves,
That, ’mid the shifting gleams and glooms,
The interchanging shine and shade,
Seem some frail garment made
By unseen hands that weave, that none perceives;
Pale hands that work invisible looms,
Now dropping shreds of light,
Now shadow-shreds, that interbraid,
And form faint colors mixed with wild perfumes.
Or, are they fragments left in flight,
These flowers that scatter every glade
With windy, beckoning white,
And breezy, fluttering blue,
Of her wild gown that shone upon my sight,
A moment, in the woods I wandered through ?
April’s, whom still I follow,
Whom still my dreams pursue;
Who leads me on by many a tangled clue
Of loveliness, until, in some green hollow,
Born of her fragrance and her melody,
But lovelier than herself and happier, too,
Cradled in blossoms of the dogwood-tree,
My soul shall see —
White as a sunbeam in the heart of day —
The infant, May.