Classic Poem

Where , northern forests, dusk and dim,
Loom dark the arctic skies along;
'Mid well-heads of the world abrim,
My swift tides sparkle into song.

By craggy waste, by haunted verge,
With woodland high on woodland piled,
Wherein rude autumn's iron surge
Thundered afar, and smote the wild.

By regions where the night-wind grieves,
Down sunsets red and ruinous,
'Neath crocus dawns and purpling eves,
And midnights lorn and luminous: —

My winding waters swell their tides,
Rocked 'mid the forest's rude unrest,
Where brooks down gleaming mountain sides
Sing, bird-like, brimming to my breast.

By craggy scarp and sheering rock
My shining music curves and cools,
Then leaps with lightning roar and shock
Into a hundred thunder pools.

By cabins in some wood's recess,
By farmlands where the fields slope down;
By busy gleaming villages,
To far-off breath and smoke of town: —

To furnace blast of city's roar,
Where life goes madd'ning to and fro,
In ceaseless murmurs evermore; —
My swift tides eddy in their flow.

Betwixt the lily and the rose
Of dewy night and petalled morn,
When life's dim wonder-gates unclose,
New glories on my breast are born.

In quiet borders where I sweep,
Housed in their roofs of bloom and sod,
My music singing round their sleep,
The dead lie looking up to God;

In those low homes of love's release,
Where all are foolish, all are wise,
The daisies blooming round their peace,
The dust of sleep upon their eyes.

By dreaming banks my voice grows dumb
In shades of summer sanctity;
And often here glad lovers come
On summer nights, and know with me, —

The under-dreams that throng and bless,
The unspoken, swift imaginings;
The sweetness tongue cannot express,
The happiness at heart of things.

And often little children race
With sunny laughter where I pass,
And kneel and mirror in my face
Their innocence, as in a glass.

Curved, sunny-breasted, where I dream,
Here in and out, then far away,
By snowy surge and amber gleam,
My waters silver into spray.

By lowlands when the noons are still,
And all the world enmeshed in sleep;
Now by a bridge, a ruined mill,
I wake with murmurs, ere I leap

In thunders o'er a craggy ledge,
To churn in surge, then sparkle, free,
In gold, across the world's dim edge,
With wimpling music to the sea.