The Black Birds

Once, only once, I saw it clear,--That Eden every human heart has dreamedA hundred times, but always far away!Ah, well do I remember how it seemed,Through the still atmosphereOf that enchanted day,To lie wide open to my weary feet:A little land of love and joy and rest,With meadows of soft green,Rosy with cyclamen, and sweetWith delicate breath of violets unseen,--And, tranquil 'mid the bloomAs if it waited for a coming guest,A little house of peace and joy and loveWas nested like a snow-white dove.

From the rough mountain where I stood,Homesick for happiness,Only a narrow valley and a darkling woodTo cross, and then the long distressOf solitude would be forever past,--I should be home at last.But not too soon! oh, let me linger hereAnd feed my eyes, hungry with sorrow,On all this loveliness, so near,And mine to-morrow!

Then, from the wood, across the silvery blue,A dark bird flew,Silent, with sable wings.Close in his wake another came,--Fragments of midnight floating throughThe sunset flame,--Another and another, weaving ringsOf blackness on the primrose sky,--Another, and another, look, a score,A hundred, yes, a thousand rising heavilyFrom that accursed, dumb, and ancient wood,They boiled into the lucid airLike smoke from some deep caldron of despair!And more, and more, and ever more,The numberless, ill-omened broodFlapping their ragged plumes,Possessed the landscape and the evening lightWith menaces and glooms.Oh, dark, dark, dark they hovered o'er the placeWhere once I saw the little house so whiteAmid the flowers, covering every traceOf beauty from my troubled sight,--And suddenly it was night!

At break of day I crossed the wooded vale;And while the morning madeA trembling light among the tree-tops pale,I saw the sable birds on every limb,Clinging together closely in the shade,And croaking placidly their surly hymn.But, oh, the little land of peace and loveThat those night-loving wings had poised above,--Where was it gone?Lost, lost, forevermore!Only a cottage, dull and gray,In the cold light of dawn,With iron bars across the door:Only a garden where the drooping headOf one sad rose, foreboding its decay,Hung o'er a barren bed:Only a desolate field that layUntilled beneath the desolate day,--Where Eden seemed to bloom I found but these!So, wondering, I passed along my way,With anger in my heart, too deep for words,Against that grove of evil-sheltering trees,And the black magic of the croaking birds.