Читать книгу Poems - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 28

  Above lone woodland ways that led

  To dells the stealthy twilights tread

  The west was hot geranium red;

    And still, and still,

  Along old lanes the locusts sow

  With clustered pearls the Maytimes know,

  Deep in the crimson afterglow,

  We heard the homeward cattle low,

  And then the far-off, far-off woe

    Of "whippoorwill!" of "whippoorwill!"

  Beneath the idle beechen boughs

  We heard the far bells of the cows

  Come slowly jangling towards the house;

    And still, and still,

  Beyond the light that would not die

  Out of the scarlet-haunted sky;

  Beyond the evening-star's white eye

  Of glittering chalcedony,

  Drained out of dusk the plaintive cry

    Of "whippoorwill," of "whippoorwill."

  And in the city oft, when swims

  The pale moon o'er the smoke that dims

  Its disc, I dream of wildwood limbs;

    And still, and still,

  I seem to hear, where shadows grope

  Mid ferns and flowers that dewdrops rope,—

  Lost in faint deeps of heliotrope

  Above the clover-sweetened slope,—

  Retreat, despairing, past all hope,

    The whippoorwill, the whippoorwill.