A Poet Silent

THE birds are silent, homesick for the south.
And you, my poet, numbed in autumn cold,
Have locked on melody your singing mouth,
And muse upon the spring; yet not that old
Sweet spring, when wing
To wing beat a twinned ecstasy, —
But the rapt secrecies you may not sing,
Of what the year, in-sheathed and folded, yet might be,
If it could break, to your amazèd eyes,
Through airs of Paradise.

So brood in silence, though the expectant ear,
Thrilled once to your clear matins, trembles yet,
And will, with ravishment’s remembered pang, to hear
The golden fret
Of words in measures ancient and in beauty new,
Born like the evocation of the leaf, and true
To rhythm as torrential rain,
Or fall of runnels, or the girdling roar
Of the unhindered main.
Still do I see you with the migrant choir
In that dejected pause of intermittent note
And sickened look and dulled desire,
Before they rise, to float
O’er fields inhospitable and branches bare
Where once their elfland arrows pierced the air.

This is the hush preliminary,
This the long rest
Writ down upon your staff of melody. O you, though dumbly now distrest,
Shall fly, your preluding all done,
Trusting the unviewed track, the charted ease
Of the winged mariner in skyey seas —
Sown with kind stars and little clouds at play —
And make at last that country where alway
They sing who live there, and their harmonies
Join in a blest accord with his pure ardencies
Who is the Lord thereof and sun.