By the kind courtesy of Messrs. D. Lothrop Company, I am permitted to
reprint in this collection seven sonnets from my volume entitled ‘In
Divers Tones.’ This is done to complete the series of sonnets dealing
with aspects of common outdoor life. The sonnets reprinted are ‘The
Sower,’ ‘The Potato Harvest,’ ‘Tides,’ ‘In September,’ ‘Dark,’ ‘Rain,’
and ‘Mist.’ The Ode for the Centenary of Shelley’s Birth was first
published by the Williamson Book Company, of Toronto, in December 1892,
in a limited edition of two hundred copies.
C. G. D. R,
Kingscroft, Windsor, N.S., Canada:
May 1893.
Across the fog the moon lies fair.
Transfused with ghostly amethyst,
O white Night, charm to wonderment
The cattle in the mist!
Thy touch, O grave Mysteriarch,
Makes dull, familiar things divine.
O grant of thy revealing gift
Be some small portion mine!
Make thou my vision sane and clear,
That I may see what beauty clings
In common forms, and find the soul
Of unregarded things!
A brown, sad-coloured hillside, where the soil
Fresh from the frequent harrow, deep and fine,
Lies bare; no break in the remote sky-line,
Save where a flock of pigeons streams aloft,
Startled from feed in some low-lying croft,
Or far-off spires with yellow of sunset shine;
And here the Sower, unwittingly divine,
Exerts the silent forethought of his toil.
Alone he treads the glebe, his measured stride
Dumb in the yielding soil; and though small joy
Dwell in his heavy face, as spreads the blind
Pale grain from his dispensing palm aside,
This plodding churl grows great in his employ;—
Godlike, he makes provision for mankind.
I see the harsh, wind-ridden, eastward hill,
By the red cattle pastured, blanched with dew;
The small, mossed hillocks where the clay gets through;
The grey webs woven on milkweed tops at will.
The sparse, pale grasses flicker, and are still.
The empty flats yearn seaward. All the view
Is naked to the horizon’s utmost blue;
And the bleak spaces stir me with strange thrill.
Not in perfection dwells the subtler power
To pierce our mean content, but rather works
Through incompletion, and the need that irks,—
Not in the flower, but effort toward the flower.
When the want stirs, when the soul’s cravings urge,
The strong earth strengthens, and the clean heavens purge.
When milking-time is done, and over all
This quiet Canadian inland forest home
And wide rough pasture-lots the shadows come,
And dews, with peace and twilight voices, fall,
From moss-cooled watering-trough to foddered stall
The tired plough-horses turn,—the barnyard loam
Soft to their feet,—and in the sky’s pale dome
Like resonant chords the swooping night-jars call.
The frogs, cool-fluting ministers of dream,
Make shrill the slow brook’s borders; pasture bars
Down clatter, and the cattle wander through,—
Vague shapes amid the thickets; gleam by gleam
Above the wet grey wilds emerge the stars,
And through the dusk the farmstead fades from view.
Here in the red heart of the sunset lying,
My rest an islet of brown weeds blown dry,
I watch the wide bright heavens, hovering nigh,
My plain and pools in lucent splendours dyeing.
My view dreams over the rosy wastes, descrying
The reed-tops fret the solitary sky;
And all the air is tremulous to the cry
Of myriad frogs on mellow pipes replying.
For the unrest of passion here is peace,
And eve’s cool drench for midday soil and taint.
To tired ears how sweetly brings release
This limpid babble from life’s unstilled complaint;
While under tired eyelids lapse and faint
The noon’s derisive visions—fade and cease.
The wash of endless waves is in their tops,
Endlessly swaying, and the long winds stream
Athwart them from the far-off shores of dream.
Through the stirred branches filtering, faintly drops
Mystic dream-dust of isle, and palm, and cave,
Coral and sapphire, realms of rose, that seem
More radiant than ever earthly gleam
Revealed of fairy mead or haunted wave.
A cloud of gold, a cleft of blue profound,—
These are my gates of wonder, surged about
By tumult of tossed bough and rocking crest:
The vision lures. The spirit spurns her bound,
Spreads her unprisoned wing, and drifts from out
This green and humming gloom that wraps my rest.
These are the fields of light, and laughing air,
And yellow butterflies, and foraging bees,
And whitish, wayward blossoms winged as these,
And pale green tangles like a seamaid’s hair.
Pale, pale the blue, but pure beyond compare,
And pale the sparkle of the far-off seas,
A-shimmer like these fluttering slopes of peas,
And pale the open landscape everywhere.
From fence to fence a perfumed breath exhales
O’er the bright pallor of the well-loved fields,—
My fields of Tantramar in summer-time;
And, scorning the poor feed their pasture yields,
Up from the bushy lots the cattle climb,
To gaze with longing through the grey, mossed rails.
On other fields and other scenes the morn
Laughs from her blue,—but not such fields are these,
Where comes no cheer of summer leaves and bees,
And no shade mitigates the day’s white scorn.
These serious acres vast no groves adorn;
But giant trunks, bleak shapes that once were trees,
Tower naked, unassuaged of rain or breeze,
Their stern grey isolation grimly borne.
The months roll over them, and mark no change.
But when Spring stirs, or Autumn stills, the year,
Perchance some phantom leafage rustles faint
Through their parched dreams,—some old-time notes ring strange,
When in his slender treble, far and clear,
Reiterates the rain-bird his complaint.
Stumps, and harsh rocks, and prostrate trunks all charred,
And gnarled roots naked to the sun and rain,—
They seem in their grim stillness to complain,
And by their plaint the evening peace is jarred.
These ragged acres fire and the axe have scarred,
And many summers not assuaged their pain.
In vain the pink and saffron light, in vain
The pale dew on the hillocks stripped and marred!
But here and there the waste is touched with cheer
Where spreads the fire-weed like a crimson flood
And venturous plumes of golden-rod appear;
And round the blackened fence the great boughs lean
With comfort; and across the solitude
The hermit’s holy transport peals serene.
This smell of home and honey on the breeze,
This shimmer of sunshine woven in white and pink
That comes, a dream from memory’s visioned brink,
Sweet, sweet and strange across the ancient trees,—
It is the buckwheat, boon of the later bees,
Its breadths of heavy-headed bloom appearing
Amid the blackened stumps of this high clearing,
Freighted with cheer of comforting auguries.
But when the blunt, brown grain and red-ripe sheaves,
Brimming the low log barn beyond the eaves,
Crisped by the first frost, feel the thresher’s flail,
Then flock the blue wild-pigeons in shy haste
All silently down Autumn’s amber trail,
To glean at dawn the chill and whitening waste.
Charm of the vibrant, white September sun—
How tower the firs to take it, tranced and still!
Their scant ranks crown the pale, round, pasture-hill,
And watch, far down, the austere waters run
Their circuit thro’ the serious marshes dun.
No bird-call stirs the blue; but strangely thrill
The blunt-faced, brown cicada’s wing-notes shrill,
A web of silver o’er the silence spun.
O zithern-winged musician, whence it came,
I wonder, this insistent song of thine!
Did once the highest string of Summer’s lyre,
Snapt on some tense chord slender as a flame,
Take form again in these vibrations fine
That o’er the tranquil spheres of noon aspire?
This windy, bright September afternoon
My heart is wide awake, yet full of dreams.
The air, alive with hushed confusion, teems
With scent of grain-fields, and a mystic rune,
Foreboding of the fall of Summer soon,
Keeps swelling and subsiding; till there seems
O’er all the world of valleys, hills, and streams,
Only the wind’s inexplicable tune.
My heart is full of dreams, yet wide awake.
I lie and watch the topmost tossing boughs
Of tall elms, pale against the vaulted blue;
But even now some yellowing branches shake,
Some hue of death the living green endows:—
If beauty flies, fain would I vanish too.