Ever Renewed

Shall I burden any handmaid, Memory, 
     With she songs I chanted of old?
They are flown, like full-fledged swallows
     The brood nest could not hold.
Does gray October remember
     The blush of the rosy June?
Do birds on the flaming maple 
     Descant in their April tune?

Will the budding wild-brier's censer
     Reburn you the last year's sweets? 
Or the heart of the frozen solstice
     Grow warm with midsummer heats?
The full rose, dropping her petals.
     Dropped with them her faint "Amen!"
The cloud of the vanished rainbow
     Wears never the same again.

Great Nature, the glorious spendthrift, 
     Hoards naught for the wily thief.
The grave of the opulent summer
     Surrenders never a leaf!
What then? Is the green year widowed?
     Are the woods but a songless choir?
Shall the rain-cloud fail in splendor, 
     And beauty forsake the brier!

The bobolink's inspiration
     Is a God's gift day by day,
From an everlasting fountain leaps
     The sun-fire's golden spray.
Each dawn is a new creation, 
     With a new “Let there be light!" 
And every burning world in the heavens 
     Was a new-born star to-night!

The violet's blue eye opens
     At the throb of a life within;
The river that flows unceasingly, 
     Unceasingly must begin.
So the draught of the Poet bubbles 
     From a depth he cannot tell.
Ye may draw it from hewn cisterns:
     He draws from the living well!