THE FIRST SPRING DAY
(To A. E. S.)
We laid you fast in frozen clay
When Winter had enchained the land.
(Lad, was it but three weeks to-day?)
And now comes Springtime’s messenger with golden tidings in his hand.
A mist blows off the thawing earth,
And drips from every budding tree,
The springs are loosed, and mad with mirth
Run lisping in the fallen leaves, or laughing in the sunlight free.
Oh you who loved the song so well,
Do you not hear the throstle’s note?
Nor heed the lovesome light that fell
As warm five thousand years ago, when Solomon, the wise king, wrote?
“Sweet,” wrote he. Yes, the light is sweet!
And maddening sweet to walk in Spring:
Yet is the pleasure incomplete—
How should the living understand the melodies that dead throats sing?
Thinker and poet clutch in vain
The secret of a laughing rill,
And Shakespeare’s self could never gain
The message blown so mockingly by trumpet of a daffodil.
Dear lad, for you I will not call,
Nor let a foolish dread be born.
A thousand years is still too small
To learn the secrets you must learn, ere you arise on Doomsday morn.
For you have set your ear to earth
To list the growing of the flowers:
And catch the strains of Death and Birth:
And take the honey that is stored by all the flitting bee-like hours.
And you must put to memory
The silver music of the stars
That raineth down so silently,
And all the mighty harmony scrolled on the sky in glittering bars.
The music that no man can make,
The colours that he cannot see,
These out of darkness you shall take
And nourish up your growing soul with manna of their mystery.
And then when you awake again
(And I have slept a little too),
How we shall rise to pace anew
An earth—where every dream is true, and nothing is unknown but pain.