In the Morning

Chapter 29: GOLDEN-ROD.

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A sequence of lyric poems that meditates on dawn, nature, and spiritual feeling, often deploying mountain, forest, and seaside imagery to probe grief, consolation, and renewal. Poems move among quiet pastorals, occasional and domestic verse, devotional hymns, translations, and lighter nonsense pieces, following seasonal rhythms and holiday observances. The voice shifts between elegiac introspection and bright affirmation, favoring sensory detail—birdsong, running water, sunlight—and a consolatory outlook that finds moral and emotional sustenance in simple scenes and ritual moments.

GOLDEN-ROD.

O’er the dusty roadside bending

With its wondrous weight of gold,

Can it be the rod enchanted

Midas used in days of old?

Hush! perchance it is a princess

In the sunlight nodding there,

Spell-bound by the wicked fairy,—

Sleepy little Golden-Hair!

Nay, it is Belshazzar’s banquet,

Where the drowsy monarch sups

With his swarm of courtiers, drinking

From the sacred, golden cups.

See, I pluck his tiny kingdom—

Long ago it was decreed—

And divide it, dear, between us,

You the Persian, I the Mede.