O, the long, long days of June!
The sunny and slumberous days
That make the whole year’s golden noon,
While the sun, as on Gibeon, stays!
The drowsing earth on its axle spins,
And the syren song of Peace begins,
With only the hum of intense life for tune!
To you I shape my votive lays,
To you a jubilant voice I raise.
Joining the immemorial choir
Of warbling throat and tremulous wire,
That chants our deathless praise!
The sea has a hue of tenderest blue,
And sleeps in a film of dreamy haze
That the mellowed sunlight shimmers through,
Like a vision of happy days:
Or if not wholly the sleep it sleeps
Forgets the wrathful equinox,
The tame Thing creeps
Like a fawning spaniel, and licks the rocks
That held it in with an iron grip,
When it foamed, and growled, and howled,
Under the Northwind’s whip!
The sun-god, throned on his flaming car,
With glory eclipsing star by star,
Has wheeled from the zodiac’s deepest deep
To his triduan rest on the mid-year’s glowing steep;
And thence he pours in a silent shower
Immeasurable light and power,
With a life-tide pulsing deep and far,
And down where the elves of the verdure sleep.
Lay your ear to the earth, O doubter of God,
To the leafing tree and the springing grass,
And mutely listen, with spirit awed,
to the march of His host through the living sod,
And the sap-duct’s narrow pass;
Ye shall hear the murmur of growing things,
The slender hum of invisible wings,
The faintest beat of the million feet
That carry His message abroad;
The yearning sigh, and the low, dull parle
Of hungry roots in nthe night-black marl,
All groping blindly for their food,
Pushing the worthless off, and clinging to the good!
O, the long, long days of June!
They set the world in tune,
And attune, as well, the open souls of men;
It is not the birds alone that sing,
But the hearts of every living thing
Run rhythmic blood, and Eden blooms again!
George Shepard Burleigh
The Long June Days