Wood-Notes

When for Love a Poet sung,—
     (Every Poet is a Lover,)
On a cythern, silver-strung
The melodious idyl rung:
Joyous sylphids, sweet and young—
     Flocked unseen, around and over.

In a dim sequestered nook,
     Under boughs of oak and holly,
Where a winding, bubbling Brook
Told him more than speech or book
From his trembling chords he shook
     The last note of melancholy.

Golden through the leafy screen
     Of the woods the sunlight glimmered
The fern-fairies, clad in green,
Dipped their sandals, half unseen,
Dimpling the smooth wave, whose sheen
     Through their fluttering tresses shimmered.

As the song within him grew
     A sweet Being bent above him
Gave his line a roseate hue,
Building every rhyme anew
To a love-kiss warm and true
     That made even his nearest[?] love him!

In his lay was mingled well
     What the wind sang to the willows,
What the orioles strove to tell
Of the wordless loves that dwell
In their small hearts, and what spell
     The Brook wrought with tiny billows.

Gray-heard Time was buried deep
     In a drift of Wilding roses
Whose warm odor seemed to steep
Wrinkled Care in balmy sleep
While old Grief forgot to weep,
     In new Love’s Metempsychosis.

Mellow murmuring of the breeze,
     Falling waters softly plashing,
Sunlight twinkling through the trees;
Mossy knoll and hum of bees.—
Something sweeter for thou there
     Gave the Poet’s song its flashing.

‘Twas the light of two blue eyes
     In his lifted blue-eyes[?] looming
Softer than the June-lit skies,—
And the bloom that  glorifies
The twin lips that brought the prize
     Of his singing and his dreaming!