Cicada

WHAT tones are these ?
What notes, outborne from stillness, now are slipping ?
Some small musician of the trees,
Some sprite, his bow in spicy resin dipping,
Drew it with sudden sleight
Across the strings, to-night.

The air was strange,
Half sweet, half harsh, the little elf was playing ;
His is score had moderate range,
And still returned; its measure short, delaying,
Slow into silence ran,
And then anew began.

Though strong, I thought
The strain a trifle husky. I remember,
In its mixed mesh was wrought
A wire of sadness, moaning of September ;
More blithe and full the tune
I heard and loved in June.

He is aware,
This rustic fiddler, that the year is waning.
A voice is in the air,
Skirting the forest edges and complaining;
Frighting by warnings dire
The poplar leaves to fire.

Whence came his sign ?
Decay, unwaked, still in his lair is sleeping ;
Green, on the growing vine
The wild grapes hang, through the twined tendrils peeping;
Springs the long, lush grass,
In the unchilled morass.

Still keen and bright
The brown wren sings at morning, and the swallow’
Swings her wide wheel of flight;
Crowding the narrow pathway through the hollow,
Comes in mid-August’s power
The stately cardinal-flower.

And yet he feels
(That quaver in his touch gives hint of grieving)
The whisper fine that steals,
The subtile presence, past my gross perceiving :
Hence that andante thin,
On his small violin !

Again inclined
To haunt the wood when nights are longer, colder,
Surely, I shall not find
This mournful prophet rasping at my shoulder:
Low he ’ll be laid,
Here where he played!

Heaven bless him !
Some good nymph lay his fiddle close beside him;
In red leaves dress him,
And underneath the mould and mosses hide him,
Far from the fruits of these
His woful auguries !