Classic Poem

I GAIN the fireside from the whetted edge
Of January's moon, and icy ruts
That gleam the more to every whistling sledge;
And by the fireside, though wind yet cuts
Canyons without, my dreaming memory
Tells my numbed senses of green summer sedge,
While these, entranced, hear half believingly,
Even as if some hoar Neanderthal
Told cave-born children of the tropic mirth
His youth remembered, in the interval
Before the glaciers came down over earth.

Half dreaming I recall in mid-July
Motionless in a notch against the blue
A peak of dawn-red cloud, that, riding high,
When noon had stripped the spider webs of dew,
In shapes of white light manifold and deep
Had spread abroad and taken all the sky.
Crickets,—the voice of fields that talk in sleep,—
Were chirping, and the shadows of cloud sent
A changeful gloom across the fields. Afar.
Out in the bay the sun that came and went
Flashed on one oar beyond the harbor-bar.

There was a highroad where through heaviest trees
The burning of the summer sun would dart
When they waved dusty leaves within the breeze.
Wheels passed; a laughing dog rode on a cart.
I struck out from the highroad, tangled soon
On paths that died in piney fastnesses,—
And there a bird sang all the afternoon.
Striving to reach the bird in hide-and-seek
I lost the bird, and in a hollow found
A pool, upon the brink a turtle sleek
That dived and blackly vanished without sound.

Can I believe that bees will yet grow bold
In the white buckwheat fields through August days?
That butterflies their yellow wings will hold
Rapt over sun-caked mud? That scrubby ways
Will turn for miles the air to ripening wine
Of berries, and the pods of milkweed fold,
As cast from heaven too soon, their armoured shine?
Alas, the time for summer dreams is past!
Alas for me that I must rise and go,
The world's death in my bones, against the blast,
Through the inertia of the fallen snow!