Mid-August

From the upland hidden,     Where the hill is sunny     Tawny like pure honey     In the August heat,     Memories float unbidden     Where the thicket serries     Fragrant with ripe berries     And the milk-weed sweet.     Like a prayer-mat holy     Are the patterned mosses     Which the twin-flower crosses     With her flowerless vine;     In fragile melancholy     The pallid ghost flowers hover     As if to guard and cover     The shadow of a shrine.     Where the pine-linnet lingered     The pale water searches,     The roots of gleaming birches     Draw silver from the lake;     The ripples, liquid-fingered,     Plucking the root-layers,     Fairy like lute players     Lulling music make.     O to lie here brooding     Where the pine-tree column     Rises dark and solemn     To the airy lair,     Where, the day eluding,     Night is couched dream laden,     Like a deep witch-maiden     Hidden in her hair.     In filmy evanescence     Wraithlike scents assemble,     Then dissolve and tremble     A little until they die;     Spirits of the florescence     Where the bees searched and tarried     Till the blossoms all were married     In the days before July.     Light has lost its splendour,     Light refined and sifted,     Cool light and dream drifted     Ventures even where,     (Seeping silver tender)     In the dim recesses,     Trembling mid her tresses,     Hides the maiden hair.     Covered with the shy-light,     Filling in the hushes,     Slide the tawny thrushes     Calling to their broods,     Hoarding till the twilight     The song that made for noon-days     Of the amorous June days     Preludes and interludes.     The joy that I am feeling     Is there something in it     Unlike the warble the linnet     Phrases and intones?     Or is a like thought stealing     With a rapture fine, free     Through the happy pine tree     Ripening her cones?     In some high existence     In another planet     Where their poets cannot     Know our birds and flowers,     Does the same persistence     Give the dreams they issue     Something like the tissue     Of these dreams of ours?     O to lie athinking -     Moods and whims! I fancy     Only necromancy     Could the web unroll,     Only somehow linking     Beauties that meet and mingle     In this quiet dingle     With the beauty of the whole.