Classic Poem

O covering grasses! O unchanging trees!
Is it not good to feel the odorous wind
Come down upon you with such harmonies.

Only the giant hills can ever find?
O little leaves, are ye not glad to be?
Is not the sunlight fair, the shadow kind,

That falls at noontide over you and me?
O gleam of birches lost among the firs,
Let your high treble chime in silverly.

Across the half-imagined wind that stirs
A muffled organ-music from the pines!
Earth knows to-day that not one note of hers.

Is minor. For, behold, the loud sun shines
Till the young maples are no longer gray,
And stronger grows their faint, uncertain lines;

Each violet takes a deeper blue to-day,
And purpler swell the cones hung overhead,
Until the sound of their far feet who stray.

About the wood, fades from me; and, instead,
I hear a robin singing — not as one
That calls unto his mate, uncomforted —
But as one sings a welcome to the sun.