| |
| WITH purple glow at even, | |
| With crimson waves at dawn, | |
| Cool bending blue of heaven, | |
| O blue lakes pulsing on; | |
| Lone haunts of wilding creatures dead to wrong; | 5 |
| Your trance of mystic beauty | |
| Is wove into my song. | |
| |
| I know no gladder dreaming | |
| In all the haunts of men, | |
| I know no silent seeming | 10 |
| Like to your shore and fen; | |
| No world of restful beauty like your world | |
| Of curvèd shores and waters, | |
| In sunlight vapors furled. | |
| |
| I pass and repass under | 15 |
| Your depths of peaceful blue; | |
| You dream your wild, hushed wonder | |
| Mine aching heart into; | |
| And all the care and unrest pass away | |
| Like night’s gray, haunted shadows | 20 |
| At the red birth of day. | |
| |
| You lie in moon-white splendor | |
| Beneath the northern sky, | |
| Your voices soft and tender | |
| In dream-worlds fade and die, | 25 |
| In whispering beaches, haunted bays and capes, | |
| Where mists of dawn and midnight | |
| Drift past in spectral shapes. | |
| |
| Beside your far north beaches | |
| Come late the quickening spring; | 30 |
| With soft, voluptuous speeches | |
| The summer, lingering, | |
| Fans with hot winds your breast so still and wide, | |
| Where June, with trancéd silence, | |
| Drifts over shore and tide. | 35 |
| |
| Beneath great crags the larches, | |
| By some lone, northern bay, | |
| Bend, as the strong wind marches | |
| Out of the dull, north day, | |
| Horning along the borders of the night, | 40 |
| With icèd, chopping waters | |
| Out in the shivering light. | |
| |
| Here the white winter’s fingers | |
| Tip with dull fires the dawn, | |
| Where the pale morning lingers | 45 |
| By stretches bleak and wan; | |
| Kindling the icèd capes with heatless glow, | |
| That renders cold and colder | |
| Lone waters, rocks and snow. | |
| |
| Here in the glad September, | 50 |
| When all the woods are red | |
| And gold, and hearts remember | |
| The long days that are dead; | |
| And all the world is mantled in a haze; | |
| And the wind, a mad musician, | 55 |
| Melodious makes the days; | |
| |
| And the nights are still, and slumber | |
| Holds all the frosty ground, | |
| And the white stars whose number | |
| In God’s great books are found, | 60 |
| Gird with pale flames the spangled, frosty sky; | |
| By white, moon-curvèd beaches | |
| The haunted hours go by. | |
| |
