Читать книгу Poems, and The Spring of Joy - Mary Webb - Страница 35

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Where the black woods grow sparse and die,

A giant broods against the sky.

The storm his chlamys, and his head

Bent to the spirits of the dead.

The windhover, floating like a leaf,

Passes him safely, clear of grief.

The auburn doves within the wood

Have pondered him and understood.

The wandering breaths of cattle come

Towards his fastness, and the hum

From paper homes of wasps, and cries

Of bees in their refectories.

The evening smoke ascends again

Out of the sapphire-circled plain,

And to the oatfield, pale as wax,

A black swift hurtles like an axe.

There shadow, with her gentle fingers,

Soothes all the dappled land; she lingers

On little croft and ample field,

With their benign and wistful yield.

The Watcher on the summit stands

With a blue goblet in his hands;

He slowly drinks the glimmering years,

The sparkling laughter and the tears.

He is not angered nor forgiving;

He does not sever dead from living,

But sees them all as long gone by.

Returning in futurity.

And still he counts, with stooping head,

The spirits of the living dead—

A soul or two in every field,

And in the furrowed, crimson weald;

And some in every orchard-close,

Who pruned the cherry and the rose,

And waited for the damson sweet,

And plodded through the brittle wheat.