Intimations of the Beautiful

The hills are full of propheciesAnd ancient voices of the dead;Of hidden shapes that no man sees,Pale, visionary presences,That speak the things no tongue hath said,No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.

The streams are full of oracles,And momentary whisperings;An immaterial beauty swellsIts breezy silver o'er the shellsWith wordless speech that sings and singsThe message of diviner things.

No indeterminable thought is theirs,The stars', the sunsets' and the flowers';Whose inexpressible speech declaresTh' immortal Beautiful, who sharesThis mortal riddle which is ours,Beyond the forward-flying hours.

It holds and beckons in the streams;It lures and touches us in allThe flowers of the golden fall--The mystic essence of our dreams:A nymph blows bubbling music whereFaint water ripples down the rocks;A faun goes dancing hoiden locks,And piping a Pandean air,Through trees the instant wind shakes bare.

Our dreams are never otherwiseThan real when they hold us so;We in some future life shall knowThem parts of it and recognizeThem as ideal substance, whenceThe actual is--(as flowers and trees,From color sources no one sees,Draw dyes, the substance of a sense)--Material with intelligence.

What intimations made them wise,The mournful pine, the pleasant beech?What strange and esoteric speech?--(Communicated from the skiesIn runic whispers)--that invokesThe boles that sleep within the seeds,And out of narrow darkness leadsThe vast assemblies of the oaks.

Within his knowledge, what one readsThe poems written by the flowers?The sermons, past all speech of ours,Preached by the gospel of the weeds?--O eloquence of coloring!O thoughts of syllabled perfume!O beauty uttered into bloom!Teach me your language! let me sing!

Along my mind flies suddenlyA wildwood thought that will not die;That makes me brother to the bee,And cousin to the butterfly:A thought, such as gives perfume toThe blushes of the bramble-rose,And, fixed in quivering crystal, glowsA captive in the prismed dew.

It leads the feet no certain way;No frequent path of human feet:Its wild eyes follow me all day;All day I hear its wild heart beat:And in the night it sings and sighsThe songs the winds and waters love;Its wild heart lying tranced above,And tranced the wildness of its eyes.

Oh, joy, to walk the way that goesThrough woods of sweet-gum and of beech!Where, like a ruby left in reach,The berry of the dogwood glows:Or where the bristling hillsides mass,'Twixt belts of tawny sassafras,Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows!

Where, in the hazy morning, runsThe stony branch that pools and drips,The red-haws and the wild-rose hipsAre strewn like pebbles; and the sun'sOwn gold seems captured by the weeds;To see, through scintillating seeds,The hunters steal with glimmering guns!

Oh, joy, to go the path which liesThrough woodlands where the trees are tall!Beneath the misty moon of fall,Whose ghostly girdle prophesiesA morn wind-swept and gray with rain;When, o'er the lonely, leaf-blown lane,The night-hawk like a dead leaf flies!

To stand within the dewy ringWhere pale death smites the boneset blooms,And everlasting's flowers, and plumesOf mint, with aromatic wing!And hear the creek,--whose sobbing seemsA wild-man murmuring in his dreams,--And insect violins that sing.

Or where the dim persimmon treeRains on the path its frosty fruit,And in the oak the owl doth hoot,Beneath the moon and mist, to seeThe outcast Year go,--Hagar-wise,--With far-off, melancholy eyes,And lips that sigh for sympathy.

Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flungIts thorny balls among the weeds,And where the milkweed's sleepy seeds,--A faery Feast of Lanterns,--swung;The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre,And o'er the hills the sunset hungA purple parchment scrawled with fire.

From silver-blue to amethystThe shadows deepened in the vale;And belt by belt the pearly-paleAladdin fabric of the mistBuilt up its exhalation far;A jewel on an Afrit's wrist,One star gemmed sunset's cinnabar.

Then night drew near, as when, alone,The heart and soul grow intimate;And on the hills the twilight sateWith shadows, whose wild robes were sownWith dreams and whispers;--dreams, that ledThe heart once with love's monotone,And memories of the living-dead.

All night the rain-gusts shook the leavesAround my window; and the blastRumbled the flickering flue, and fastThe storm streamed from the dripping eaves.As if--'neath skies gone mad with fear--The witches' Sabboth galloped past,The forests leapt like startled deer.

All night I heard the sweeping sleet;And when the morning came, as slowAs wan affliction, with the woeOf all the world dragged at her feet,No spear of purple shattered throughThe dark gray of the east; no bowOf gold shot arrows swift and blue.

But rain, that whipped the windows; filledThe spouts with rushings; and aroundThe garden stamped, and sowed the groundWith limbs and leaves; the wood-pool filledWith overgurgling.--Bleak and coldThe fields looked, where the footpath woundThrough teasel and bur-marigold.

Yet there's a kindness in such daysOf gloom, that doth console regretWith sympathy of tears, which wetOld eyes that watch the back-log blaze.--A kindness, alien to the deepGlad blue of sunny days that letNo thought in of the lives that weep.

This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers,--As might a face within our sleep,With stone-gray eyes that weep and weep,And wet brows bound with sodden flowers,--Is sunset to some sister land;A land of ruins and of palms;Rich sunset, crimson with long calms,--Whose burning belt low mountains bar,--That sees some brown Rebecca standBeside a well the camel-bandWinds down to 'neath the evening star.

O sunset, sister to this dawn!O dawn, whose face is turned away!Who gazest not upon this day,But back upon the day that's gone!Enamored so of loveliness,The retrospect of what thou wast,Oh, to thyself the present trust!And as thy past be beautifulWith hues, that never can grow less!Waiting thy pleasure to expressNew beauty lest the world grow dull.

Down in the woods a sorcerer,Out of rank rain and death, distills,--Through chill alembics of the air,--Aromas that brood everywhereAmong the whisper-haunted hills:The bitter myrrh of dead leaves fillsWet valleys (where the gaunt weeds bleach)With rainy scents of wood-decay;--As if a spirit all the daySat breathing softly 'neath the beech.

With other eyes I see her flit,The wood-witch of the wild perfumes,Among her elfin owls,--that sit,A drowsy white, in crescent-litDim glens of opalescent glooms:--Where, for her magic, buds and bloomsMysterious perfumes, while she stands,A thornlike shadow, summoningThe sleepy odors, that take wingLike bubbles from her dewy hands.

Among the woods they call to me--The lights that haunt the wood and stream;Voices of such white ecstasyAs moves with hushed lips through a dream:They stand in auraed radiances,Or flash with nimbused limbs acrossTheir golden shadows on the moss,Or slip in silver through the trees.

What love can give the heart in meMore hope and exaltation thanThe hand of light that tips the treeAnd beckons far from marts of man?That reaches foamy fingers throughThe broken ripple, and repliesWith sparkling speech of lips and eyesTo souls who seek and still pursue.

Give me the streams, that counterfeitThe twilight of autumnal skies;The shadowy, silent waters, litWith fire like a woman's eyes!Slow waters that, in autumn, glassThe scarlet-strewn and golden grass,And drink the sunset's tawny dyes.

Give me the pools, that lie amongThe centuried forests! give me those,Deep, dim, and sad as darkness hungBeneath the sunset's somber rose:Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look--Like ragged gypsies round a bookOf magic--trees in wild repose.

No quiet thing, or innocent,Of water, earth, or air shall pleaseMy soul now: but the violentBetween the sunset and the trees:The fierce, the splendid, and intense,That love matures in innocence,Like mighty music, give me these!

When thorn-tree copses still were bareAnd black along the turbid brook;When catkined willows blurred and shookGreat tawny tangles in the air;In bottomlands, the first thaw makesAn oozy bog, beneath the trees,Prophetic of the spring that wakes,Sang the sonorous hylodes.

Now that wild winds have stripped the thorn,And clogged with leaves the forest-creek;Now that the woods look blown and bleak,And webs are frosty white at morn;At night beneath the spectral sky,A far foreboding cry I hear--The wild fowl calling as they fly?Or wild voice of the dying Year?

And still my soul holds phantom tryst,When chestnuts hiss among the coals,Upon the Evening of All Souls,When all the night is moon and mist,And all the world is mystery;I kiss dear lips that death hath kissed,And gaze in eyes no man may see,Filled with a love long lost to me.

I hear the night-wind's ghostly gloveFlutter the window: then the knobOf some dark door turn, with a sobAs when love comes to gaze on loveWho lies pale-coffined in a room:And then the iron gallop ofThe storm, who rides outside; his plumeSweeping the night with dread and gloom.

So fancy takes the mind, and paintsThe darkness with eidolon light,And writes the dead's romance in nightOn the dim Evening of All Saints:Unheard the hissing nuts; the clinkAnd fall of coals, whose shadow faintsAround the hearts that sit and think,Borne far beyond the actual's brink.

I heard the wind, before the mornStretched gaunt, gray fingers 'thwart my pane,Drive clouds down, a dark dragon-train;Its iron visor closed, a hornOf steel from out the north it wound.--No morn like yesterday's! whose mouth,A cool carnation, from the southBreathed through a golden reed the soundOf days that drop clear gold uponCerulean silver floors of dawn.

And all of yesterday is lostAnd swallowed in to-day's wild light--The birth deformed of day and night,The illegitimate, who costIts mother secret tears and sighs;Unlovely since unloved; and chilledWith sorrows and the shame that filledIts parents' love; which was not wiseIn passion as the day and nightThat married yestermorn with light.

Down through the dark, indignant trees,On indistinguishable wingsOf storm, the wind of evening swings;Before its insane anger fleesDistracted leaf and shattered bough:There is a rushing as when seasOf thunder beat an iron prowOn reefs of wrath and roaring wreck:'Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speckOf flickering blackness, driven by,A mad bat whirls along the sky.

Like some sad shadow, in the eve'sDeep melancholy--visibleAs by some strange and twilight spell--A gaunt girl stands among the leaves,The night-wind in her dolorous dress:Symbolic of the life that grieves,Of toil that patience makes not less,Her load of fagots fallen there.--A wilder shadow sweeps the air,And she is gone.... Was it the dumbEidolon of the month to come?

The song birds--are they flown away?The song birds of the summer time,That sang their souls into the day,And set the laughing hours to rhyme.No catbird scatters through the bushThe sparkling crystals of its song;Within the woods no hermit-thrushThridding with vocal gold the hush.

All day the crows fly cawing past:The acorns drop: the forests scowl:At night I hear the bitter blastHoot with the hooting of the owl.The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewnWith leaves that clog: beneath the treeThe bird, that set its toil to tune,And made a home for melody,Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.