TO A BIRD AT DAWN
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
Now the slow light fills all the trees,
The world, before so still and strange,
With day's familiar presences,
Back to its common self must change,
And little gossip shapes of song
The porches of the morning throng.
"One of the finest lyrics our language or any
duced."-Current Opinion.
other has pro-
YOU MUST MEAN MORE-
O bird that somewhere yonder sings
In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn,
Lone in the hush of sleeping things.
In some sky sanctuary withdrawn;
Your perfect song is too like pain,
And will not let me sleep again.
I think you must be more than bird,
A little creature of soft wings;
Not yours this deep and thrilling word-
Some morning planet 'tis that sings;
Surely from no small feathered throat
Wells that august, eternal note.
As some old language of the dead,
In one resounding syllable,
Says Rome and Greece, and all is said-
A simple word a child may spell;
So in your liquid note impearled
Sings the long epic of the world.
Unfathomed sweetness of your song,
With ancient anguish at its core,
What night of elemental wrong,
With shudder unimagined, bore
Peace so divine-what hell hath trod
This voice that softly talks with God!
All silence in one silver flower
Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks
The moon in heaven, yet hath power
To tell the soul the think it seeks,
And pack, as by some wizard's art,
The whole within the finite part.
To you, sweet bird, ohe well might feign-
With such authority you sing
So clear, yet so profound, a strain
Into the simple ear of spring-
Some simple understanding given
Of the hid purposes of Heaven.
Not yours with such as these to vie
That of the day's small business sing,
Voice of man's heart and of God's sky-
But 0 you make so deep a thing
Of joy, I dare not think of pain
Until I hear you sing again.
-Copyright, The John Lane Co.
MAY IS BUILDING HER HOUSE
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
May is building her house. With apple blooms
She is roofing over the glimmering rooms;
Of the oak and the beech hath she builded its beams,
And, spinning all day at her secret looms,
With arras of leaves each wind-swayed wall
She pictureth over, and peopleth it all.
With echoes and dreams,
And singing of streams.
May is building her house. Of petal and blade,
Of the roots of the oak is the flooring made,
With a carpet of mosses and lichen and clover,
Each small miracle over and over,
And tender, traveling green things strayed.
Her windows, the morning and evening star,
And her rustling doorways, ever ajar
With the coming and going
Of fair things blowing,
The thresholds of the four winds are.
May is building her house. From the dust of things
She is making the songs and the flowers and the wings;
From October's tossed and trodden gold
She is making the young year out of the old;
Yea! out of winter's flying sleet
She is making all the summer sweet,
And the brown leaves spurned of November's feet
She is changing back again to spring.
-Copyright, The John Lane Co.
You must mean more than just this hour
You perfect thing so subtly fair,
Simple and complex as a flower,
Wrought with such planetary care:
How patient the eternal power
That wove the marvel of your hair.
How long the sunlight and the sea
Wove and rewove this rippling gold
To rhythms of eternity;
And many a flashing thing grew old
Waiting this miracle to be;
And painted marvels manifold.
Still with his work unsatisfied,
' Eager each new effect to try,
The solemn artist cast aside
Rainbow and shell and butterfly,-
As some stern blacksmith scatters wide
The sparks that from his anvil fly.
How many shells whorl within whorl,
Litter the marges of the sphere
With wrack of unregarded pearl,
To shape that little thing. four ear:
Creation, just to make one gr
Hath travailed with exceeding fear.
The moonlight of forgotten seas
Dwells in your eyes, and on your tongue
The honey of a million bees
And all the sorrow of all song;
You are the ending of all these,
The world grew old to make you young.
All Time hath travelled to this rose--
To the strange making of this face
Came agonies of fires and snows;
And Death and April, nights and days
Unnumbered, unimagined throes
Find in this flower their resting-place.
Strange Artist, to my aching thought
Give answer; all the patient power
That to this perfect ending wrought---
Shall it mean nothing but this hour!
Say not that it is all for nought
Time brings Eternity a flower.
-Copyright, The John Lane Co.
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And all my life until this day,
And all my life'until I die,
All joy and sorow of the way,
Seem calling yonder in the sky;
And thereis something the song saith
That makes me unafraid of death.
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You would not miss Lowell, Longfellow, Riley or Kipling
and you should not miss LeGallienne.