The Forest Spring

Push back the brambles, berry-blue:     The hollowed spring is full in view:     Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern     Its rock-embedded, crystal urn.     Not for the loneliness that keeps     The coigne wherein its silence sleeps;     Not for wild butterflies that sway     Their pansy pinions all the day     Above its mirror; nor the bee,     Nor dragon-fly, that passing see     Themselves reflected in its spar;     Not for the one white liquid star,     That twinkles in its firmament;     Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent     Athwart it when the kindly night     Beads all its grasses with the light     Small jewels of the dimpled dew;     Not for the day's inverted blue     Nor the quaint, dimly coloured stones     That dance within it where it moans:     Not for all these I love to sit     In silence and to gaze in it.     But, know, a nymph with merry eyes     Looks at me from its laughing skies;     A graceful glimmering nymph who plays     All the long fragrant summer days     With instant sights of bees and birds,     And speaks with them in water words,     And for whose nakedness the air     Weaves moony mists, and on whose hair,     Unfilleted, the night will set     That lone star as a coronet.