The time has been that these wild solitudes, Yet beautiful as wild, were trod by me Oftener than now; and when the ills of life Had chafed my spirit—when the unsteady pulse Beat with strange flutterings—I would wander forth And seek the woods. The sunshine on my path Was to me a friend. The swelling hills, The quiet dells retiring far between, With gentle invitation to explore Their windings, were a calm society That talked with me and soothed me. Then the chant Of birds, and chime of brooks, and soft caress Of the fresh sylvan air, made me forget The thoughts that broke my peace, and I began
He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
To the dim light and the large circle of shade I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills, There where we see no color in the grass. Natheless my longing loses not its green, It has so taken root in the hard stone Which talks and hears as though it were a lady.
Utterly frozen is this youthful lady, Even as the snow that lies within the shade; For she is no more moved than is the stone By the sweet season which makes warm the hills And alters them afresh from white to green Covering their sides again with flowers and grass.
By the stream, where the ground is soft and gives, under the slightest pressure—even the fly would leave its footprint here and the paw of the shrew the crescent of its claws like the strokes of a chisel in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain
The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When no voice replied,
I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way, Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring, And gentle odours led my steps astray, Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.
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