On Truro Hills
Upon those dome like hills of sand
A wonderous carpet has been laid,
Rich as the rugs of Samarkand
And gorgeous as some rare brocade
Wrought on the looms of far Cathay
Or by the shrines of Mandalay.
It covers well those hills of sand
That glaciers rounded long ago,
Nor can the dyes of Samarkand
Display a stranger, deeper glow
Such tints of red and gray and green
With gold and amber in between.
To rolling slopes the lichens cling
And tufts of bunch grass russet sere,
Through them the murmurous breezes sing
While clustering sweet fern, far and near
Wafts spicy smells like incense o’er
Those lonely hills from wood to shore
The wild bearberry shyly twines
Its sinuous length through grass and moss,
How glossy are its clinging vines
From green to rusty red. Across
Its sheen the sunbeams dreamily
Play like the waves upon the sea.
Blueberry clumps in curving lines
Mingle with waxen bayberry
To trace their arabesque designs
On richly wrought embroidery,
With borders in the marshy sedge
And fringing beach grass for the edge.
A treeless waste it seems, but no
The scrub oak, lichen crusted, cowers
And dwarf pines, gnarled and twisted, grow
By beach plum thickets, white with flowers
A waste that blooms with rarer dyes
Than jungles turn to tropic skies.
And there are thread bare patches too
That add more color to the heath
For where the texture is worn through
It shows the golden sands beneath,
While in the afternoon’s slant rays
All outlines blur in purple haze.
Uncanny moorland, desolate
And in the dusk how weirdly still,
A landscape one can ne’er forget.
O’er ghostly hollow wraithlike hill
What timid moonsprites nightly flee
The muttering demons of the sea!
The ebbing seasons merely change
That coverlet from day to day,
By shifting, in their varied range
From sober hues to some more gay,
While from the sea and sky and air
Fresh color splashes everywhere.
That turf rough seeded by the wind
And nurtured by the pensive sun,
Is richer than the shawls of Ind,
Or that famed carpet once begun
By Jinns and Peris, known of yore,
That through the air the Genii bore.
Perhaps on some enchanted breeze
From Kurdistan or Araby
Those Genii over unknown seas
Have borne this priceless tapestry,
This fabric wrought in Faery land
To beautify a barren strand.
’Tis woven on the loom of time
Spun from the filaments of dreams,
This magic carpet. Age nor clime
Can match its pattern, or the streams
Of color lavish Nature spills
O’er Truro’s ancient, windswept hills