Classic Poem

Your fingers sweep the keys, and then
By river reach and iris fen
The long dead days come back again.

Smile on me once again, and so
Waft me on music soft and low
Down the far hills of long ago,

Where lonely sunsets blow and fade
For one whose haunted heart has strayed
At evening to the upland glade

Where he can hear the wild geese cry
Across the solitary sky;
And the cold sweeping winds go by

With broken words that laugh and weep
Like some one troubled in his sleep
By visions of the calling deep.

Strange forest-girdled lakes, whose moods
Lie hidden in far solitudes
Where no irreverent foot intrudes;

Black, tossing rapids, through whose roar
A vague, great voice forevermore
Goes echoing from shore to shore;

All phases of that wilderness
Whose close communion used to bless
My boyhood in its loneliness;

All these across my spirit's ken
Sweep by on waves of sound, and then —
A sharp, sweet chord — they fade again.

The wandering ghosts have found their tomb;
And here, within this shadowed room,
Your gold hair glimmers through the gloom.