Читать книгу Poems - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 13

  My soul goes out to her who says,

  "Come, follow me and cast off care!"

  Then tosses back her sun-bright hair,

  And like a flower before me sways

  Between the green leaves and my gaze:

  This creature like a girl, who smiles

  Into my eyes and softly lays

  Her hand in mine and leads me miles,

  Long miles of haunted forest ways.

  Sometimes she seems a faint perfume,

  A fragrance that a flower exhaled

  And God gave form to; now, unveiled,

  A sunbeam making gold the gloom

  Of vines that roof some woodland room

  Of boughs; and now the silvery sound

  Of streams her presence doth assume—

  Music, from which, in dreaming drowned,

  A crystal shape she seems to bloom.

  Sometimes she seems the light that lies

  On foam of waters where the fern

  Shimmers and drips; now, at some turn

  Of woodland, bright against the skies,

  She seems the rainbowed mist that flies;

  And now the mossy fire that breaks

  Beneath the feet in azure eyes

  Of flowers; now the wind that shakes

  Pale petals from the bough that sighs.

  Sometimes she lures me with a song;

  Sometimes she guides me with a laugh;

  Her white hand is a magic staff,

  Her look a spell to lead me long:

  Though she be weak and I be strong,

  She needs but shake her happy hair,

  But glance her eyes, and, right or wrong,

  My soul must follow—anywhere

  She wills—far from the world's loud throng.

  Sometimes I think that she must be

  No part of earth, but merely this—

  The fair, elusive thing we miss

  In Nature, that we dream we see

  Yet never see: that goldenly

  Beckons; that, limbed with rose and pearl,

  The Greek made a divinity:—

  A nymph, a god, a glimmering girl,

  That haunts the forest's mystery.