James Cobourg Hodgins
Once More
ONCE more the robin flutes in glee,
On heat returning.
The living juices in the trees
Are shooting in the early leaves,—
The blossoms break,
And lusty nature wide awake
Her pleasant task sits learning.
The fleecy clouds scud o’er the blue,
In sudden glory.
The woods are full of whistling birds,
And nature, in strange mystic words,
Relates once more,
In the same strains as oft before,
The one old golden story:
That he who lives close to her heart,
Nor spurns her warning,
Shall all life’s cunning secrets learn:
The trill of birds, the tress of fern,
The roar of seas,
The music of the wind-swept trees,
The glory of the morning;
Shall learn the noiseless laws of life,
The truths of beauty,
And find that Nature’s meanest guise
Is full of wonder and surprise;
That everything
Doth to the surface ever bring
The blessedness of duty.
A Greek Reverie
THIS is the purple sea of ancient song.
These are the groves to which bacchantes lured.
In these grim rocks bad spirits are immured,
Pent in by Heaven in token of some wrong.
Sure that was Pan who flashed by through the pine,
Followed by boys with passionate eyes, and men
Bedecked with roses! Fainter down the glen
Tramps the mad rabble, caught with song divine.
Now once again the Lord of life and day
Smites into splendor all the dull waste waves:
Straight Ulysses, his face, sleep-swollen, laves,
Rouses his heroes, and with scant delay
Prows are turned homeward. Hark the measured beat!
Another weary day and vacant sky and heat!