Fancies

How falls it, Oriole, thou hast come to fly
In tropic splendor through our northern sky ?

At some blithe moment was it nature’s choice
To dower a scrap of sunset with a voice ?

Or did some orange tulip, flaked with black,
In some forgotten garden, ages back,

Yearning toward heaven until its wish was heard,
Desire unspeakably to be a bird ?

WHEN the mild gold stars flower out,
As the summer gloaming goes,
A dim shape quivers about
Some sweet, rich heart of a rose.

If you watch its fluttering poise,
From palpitant wings will steal
A hum like the eerie noise
Of an elfin spinning-wheel.

And then from the shape’s vague sheen
Deep lustres of blue will float,
That melt in luminous green
Round a glimmer of ruby throat.

But fleetly across the gloom
This tremulous shape will dart,
While searching for some new bloom,
To quiver about its heart.

And you, with thoughts of it stirred,
Will dreamily ask of them :
“ Is it a gem, half bird?
Or is it a bird, half gem ? ”

HAP-HAZARD hybrid that one sees,
Half bird, half reptile, fluttering through

Those sultry twilights, when the trees
Loom breezeless on the dreamy blue;
Strange, blundering mongrel of the air,
At random war with here and there,
Now wheeling wild and swooping now;
In what mad mood did nature please
Her sweet, rich harmonies to scare
With such dark dissonance as thou ?
Shape that unseemliest traits endow,
Grotesque, chimeric, cold, impure,
With Satan’s wings in miniature!

Nay, is it that thou lingerest here
As the last-left weak heir of what
Survives from many a wrecking year
In shadowy fable, trusted not ?
Does altered time in thee behold
One waif from horrors manifold,
Ghoul, griffon, dragon, ouphe, gnome, sprite,
That living shook the earth with fear,
And dying when the earth was old,
In mockery of their crumbled might,
Foredoomed to thee thy dismal flight
Through lands where once, by dread dismay,
Thine awful ancestry held sway ?

BLUE dusk, that brings the dewy hours,
Brings thee, of graceless form in sooth,
Dark stumbler at the roots of flowers,
Flaccid, inert, uncouth.

Right ill can human wonder guess
Thy meaning or thy mission here,
Gray lump of mottled clamminess,
With that preposterous leer!

But when I meet thy dull bulk where
Luxurious roses bend and burn,
Or some slim lily lifts to air
Its frail and fragrant urn,

Of these, among the garden ways,
So grim a watcher dost thou seem
That I, with meditative gaze,
Look down on thee and dream

Of thick-lipped slaves, with ebon skin,
That squat in hideous dumb repose,
And guard the drowsy ladies in
Their still seraglios!