Marble Faun & Green Bough Read Free

flowers dreaming in their beds
Like convent girls, filling their sleep
With strange dreams from the outer deep.
On every hill battalioned trees
March skyward on unmoving knees,
And like a spider on a veil
Climbs the moon. A nightingale,
Lost in the trees against the sky,
Loudly repeats its jewelled cry.
    I AM sad, nor yet can I,
For all my questing, reason why;
And now as night falls I will go
Where two breezes joining flow
Above a stream whose gleamless deeps
Caressingly sing the while it sleeps
Upon sands powdered by the moon.
And there I’ll lie to hear it croon
In fondling a wayward star
Fallen from the shoreless far
Sky, while winds in misty stream,
Laughing and weeping in a dream,
Whisper of an orchard’s trees
That, shaken by the aimless breeze,
Let their blossoms fade and slip
Soberly, as lip to lip
They touch the misty grasses fanned
To ripples by the breeze.
                                         Here stand
The clustered lilacs faint as cries
Against the silken-breasted skies;
They nod and sway, and slow as rain
Their slowly falling petals stain
The grass as through them breezes stray,
Smoothing them in silver play.
And we, the marbles in the glade,
Dreaming in the leafy shade
Are saddened, for we know that all
Things save us must fade and fall,
And the moon that sits there in the skies
Draws her hair across her eyes:
She sees the blossoms blow and die,
Soberly and quietly,
Till spring breaks in the waiting glade
And the first thin branchèd shade
Falls ’thwart them, and the swallows’ cry
Calls down from the stirring sky,
Thin and cold and hot as flame
Where spring is nothing but a name.
    The stream flows calmly without sound
In the darkness gathered round;
Trembling to the vagrant breeze
About me stand the inky trees
Peopled by some bird’s loud cries,
Until it seems as if the skies
Had shaken down their blossomed stars
Seeking among the trees’ dim bars,
Crying aloud, each for its mate,
About the old earth, insensate,
Seemingly, to their white woe,
But their sorrow does she know
And her breast, unkempt and dim,
Throbs her sorrow out to them.
The dying day gives all who sorrow
The boon no king may give: a morrow.
    T HE ringèd moon sits eerily
Like a mad woman in the sky,
Dropping flat hands to caress
The far world’s shaggy flanks and breast,
Plunging white hands in the glade
Elbow deep in leafy shade
Where birds sleep in each silent brake
Silverly, there to wake
The quivering loud nightingales
Whose cries like scattered silver sails
Spread across the azure sea.
Her hands also caress me:
My keen heart also does she dare;
While turning always through the skies
Her white feet mirrored in my eyes
Weave a snare about my brain
Unbreakable by surge or strain,
For the moon is mad, for she is old,
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told;
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.
    The hushèd earth, so calm, so old,
Dreams beneath its heath and wold—
And heavy scent from thorny hedge
Paused and snowy on the edge
Of some dark ravine, from where
Mists as soft and thick as hair
Float silver in the moon.
    Stars sweep down—or are they stars?—
Against the pines’ dark etchèd bars.
Along a brooding moon-wet hill
Dogwood shines so cool and still,
Like hands that, palm up, rigid lie
In invocation to the sky
As they spread there, frozen white,
Upon the velvet of the night.
    T HE world is still. How still it is!
About my avid stretching ears
The earth is pulseless in the dim
Silence that flows into them
And forms behind my eyes, until
My head is full: I feel it spill
Like water down my breast. The world,
A muted violin where are curled
Pan’s fingers, waits, supine and cold
And bound soundlessly in fold
On fold of blind calm rock
Edgeless in the moonlight’s shock,
Until the hand that grasps the bow
Descends; then grave and strong and low
It rises to his waiting ears.
The music of all passing years
Flows over him and down his