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| O DAPPLED throat of white! Shy, hidden bird! | |
| Perched in green dimness of the dewy wood, | |
| And murmuring, in that lonely, lover mood, | |
| Thy heart-ache, softly heard, | |
| Sweetened by distance, over land and lake. | 5 |
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| Why, like a kinsman, do I feel thy voice | |
| Awaken voices in me free and sweet? | |
| Was there some far ancestral birdhood fleet | |
| That rose and would rejoice: | |
| A broken cycle rounded in a song? | 10 |
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| The lake, like steady wine in a deep cup, | |
| Lay crystal in the curving mountain deeps; | |
| And now the air brought that long lyric up | |
| That sobs, then falls and weeps, | |
| And hushes silence into listening hope. | 15 |
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| Is it that we were sprung of one old kin, | |
| Children of brooding earth, that lets us tell, | |
| Thou from thy rhythmic throat, I deep within, | |
| These syllables of her spell, | |
| This hymnëd wisdom of her pondering years? | 20 |
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| For thou hast spoken song-wise in a tongue | |
| I knew not till I heard the buried air | |
| Burst from the boughs and bring me what thou sung, | |
| Here where the lake lies bare | |
| To reaching summits and the azure sky. | 25 |
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| Thy music is a language of the trees, | |
| The brown soil, and the never-trodden brake; | |
| Translatress art thou of dumb mysteries | |
| That dream through wood and lake; | |
| And I, in thee, have uttered what I am! | 30 |
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