Page:Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia.djvu/22

And good the comfortable green of grass
And Nysian meadows still so milky pale;
Good seems the dark steer in the noonday sun,
The ploughman’s keel that turns black waves of loam,
The laughing girls, the fluting shepherd boys,
And beautiful the song of many birds;
Good seem these golden bees whose busy wings
With wavering music drone and die away,—
The orchard odours and the seas of bloom;
And good the valleys where the green leaves breathe,
The hills where all the patient pines look down;
Good seem the lowland poplars bathed in light,
That pillar from the plain this tent of blue,—
The quiet homes amid the cooling fields,
The flashing rivers and the woods remote,
The little high white town among the hills!

All, all are good to look on, and most dear
To my remembering eyes. Each crocus, too,
And gold narcissus, gleams memorial,—
Untouched of sorrow for that troubled day
Impetuous hoof and wheel threshed through the wheat,
And ’mid these opiate blooms the Four-Horsed One
Swept down on me, half lost in pensive dreams,
And like a poppy in some panting noon,
All drooping, bore me to the gates of Hell,—
When on my fragile girlhood closed his arms
As on some seed forlorn Earth’s darkest loam.
Yet think not, Mother, this fierce Son of Night