Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/172

So swarmed and sprang, as a covey they start,
The song-birds hatched of a hot glad heart,
With notes too shrill and a windy joy
Fluttering and firing the brain of a boy,
With far keen echoes of painless pain
Beating their wings on his heart and his brain,
Till a life's whole reach, were it brief, were it long,
Seemed but a field to be sown with song.

 The snow-time is melted, the flower-time is fled,
That were one to me then for the joys they shed.
Joys in garland and sorrows in sheaf,
Rose-red pleasure and gold-eared grief,
Reared of the rays of a mid-noon sky,
I have gathered and housed them, worn and put by,
These wild-weed waifs with a wan green bloom
Found in the grass of that old year's tomb,
Touched by the gleam of it, soiled with its dust,
I well could leave in the green grave's trust,
Lightly could leave in the light wind's care
Were all thoughts dead of the dead life there.
But if some note of its old glad sound
In your ear should ring as a dream's rebound,
As a song, that sleep in his ear keeps yet,
Tho' the senses and soul rewaking forget.

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