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Time and Place

Summer

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Summer

page 17

November

The gorse is rusting; dust on wayside verdure lies;
Hedge hawthorns heavily hang down snow festoons;
On purple mountains steadily melt those other snows;
Ever the noonday sky in darkening azure burns;
The airy willows muffled now in wadded robes,
A deeper sigh of wind resounds through denser boughs;
Thickly the grass to leaf, to seed, to hay matures;
The sturdy lambs have given over nursery games,
And reverend cattle wait their hour in grave repose.

Thus in young summer green-wreathed earth prepares
Her year-long increment, and fills her wealthy stores,
Made ready, all unwitting, for the sacrifice.…
Thou, heart of man, thou knowest thy dear joys
Are richly added to thee, not to clutch the prize;
These, in due season, presently, thou offerest likewise.

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Drive to North Canterbury

The January sun had veiled
His burning gaze of yesterday,
And his bright glances of the morn
With drooping mists, ere we had hailed
The northern hills; a curtain grey
Was hung about our rural way,
But painted on its shadowy fold
Were, spiral green and level gold,
The willow-trees and fields of corn.

The sturdy wheat’s terrestrial hold,
Established in the former rains,
And sucking yet from source unseen,
Maintained erect those crests of gold
Above the pasture of the plains;
And lively yet, in willowy veins,
Flowed the refreshment of the spring,
Or hidden watercourse might bring
Renewal of their vernal green.

Never, in a remembered year,
Faring by that remembered road,
Stood the crops thicker in the field,
Throve the wheat richer in the ear,
Nor had the bordering willows showed,
Where drain or hidden river flowed,
Such fresh and mossy verdure massed
Against the soft clouds, as they passed,
By a low wandering gleam revealed.

All Summer’s heat burned in that grain,
Embered upon the cloudy veil;
All Spring’s quick energy reborn
In those green leaves… The old refrain:

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Seed-time and harvest shall not fail
Is news the centuries cannot stale!
Painted upon an evening grey
We keep for memory of that day
The willows and the standing corn.

Be thankful, travellers, who greet
The tawny harvest-fields unrolled,
That bread for body’s need is given
And likewise spiritual meat:
For, ’tis the lustre on the gold,
The grace wherewith in green is stoled,
Mid solitude of misty grey,
The careless willow by the way,
That lure the soul from earth to heaven.

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Forest Sleep

Think you, lone wanderer, for an hour withdrawn
From that hot argument by human commerce bred,
Think you not the innermost forest hath foreknown
The whole narrative of the heart’s competence and need?

The boughs wear drapery of woe, their weeds
Weeping slow rain silently, the leaves
Are tears, and sunlight, tear-reflected, goads
The groundling grasses to ascend their stemmy rooves
And run to reddened heaven above the gloom—
Melodious gloom, for everywhere a flute,
Plaintive or jubilant, alike with fleeting gleam
In liquid shadow plashes a pure note.

Though every verdurous depth deny the sun,
And shaft of sun but deepen the cool shade,
And every smallest sound the stillness to adorn
With contradiction stir, harmonious abide
The forest solitudes; think you not truly, then,
The linked light and darkness, laughter and grief
Forecast the consciousness of microcosm, man,
The tuned antinomies of his mysterious life?

Howbeit, wanderer, having slaked your drought
In forest silence, eyes in greenness steeped,
To mossy stature with the knotted creepers stooped
Cede separateness, and disarm observant thought;
Take root with trees in centuries of decay,
And with their leaves inbreathe the woody fume,
From leafy drowse let individual dream
Drop with those bird-notes in a falling joy,
(Like jewels dropping into a dark well
Dug long ago amid the ligneous dust,)
And all particular dissolved to primal mist,
Whereof the Thinker fashions what he will.

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Levavi Oculos

The delicate lines of the hills of this country,
Rain-swept and sun-tanned, naked to the four winds,
Console our tired eyes as the high-lineaged kine do,
With their fine-chiselled flanks in a near field reclined,
Bring solace, calm as the quiet hills are,
Composed of the same lineaments in one design.

These tussocked hills have the texture of paduasoy,
Seen afar off, or a venerable mere smoothed
And soft-surfaced by immemorial friction;
Or of brown-leathered, road-worn shoes;
Or of shrine steps, foot-rounded by pilgrims,
Or a dun-wooded, kiss-saluted rood.

Wish not for these again their cloak and vesture,
The rich and dark array, fire-burned and axe-felled
By foreign tribes, (even ours, ours, the invaders,)
But hail these clean lines, with him who first beheld
The divine form revealed of a young lissom goddess,
Poised, zephyr-sped, on brim of voyaging shell.

These lines, at night-fall, melting into the arable,
Enclosing wine-tawny and grape-violet shades,
Affect us as a faint air might, played upon a virginal,
So long ago that all pain it held then is allayed;
Or clarinet, so far distant it brings us but a memory
Of healed lament, in the dim twilight, dying away.

These hills at dawn are of an austere architecture,
Claustral; like a grave assembly, night-cold numbed,
Of nuns, singing matins and lauds in perpetuity,
While the sluggard multitude without is dumb;
But at sunrise carmined, gilded; as of rare cosmetics
A girl takes, for more beauty now, lest her lover come.

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But at mid-day, the bare hills have a remote wildness,
Like a young colt or filly, unrestrained
And running lithely, never having known bit nor bridle,
Or lying down quiet, knowing nor spur nor rein.…
How often, on dusty plain pent, have I lifted up mine eyes there,
And found freedom, and found mind-liberty again!

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