And now to the wheat-fields Come the weird reapers Armed with their sickles, Whipping them keenly In the fresh-air fields, Wild with the joy of them, Finding them trusty, Hilted with teen. Swarming like ants, The Idea for captain, No banners, no bugles, Only a terrible Ground-bass of gathering Tempest and fury, Only a tossing Of arms and of garments; Sexless and featureless, (Only the children Different among them, Crawling between their feet, Borne on their shoulders;) Rolling their shaggy heads Wild with the unheard-of Drug of the sunshine; Tears that had eaten The half of their eyelids Dry on their cheeks; Blood in their stiffened hair Clouted and darkened; Down in their cavern hearts Hunger the tiger, Leaping, exulting; Sighs that had choked them Burst into triumphing; On they come, Victory! Up to the wheat-fields, Dreamed of in visions Bred by the hunger, Seen for the first time Splendid and golden; On they come fluctuant, Seething and breaking, Weltering like fire In the pit of the earthquake, Bursting in heaps With the sudden intractable Lust of the hunger: Then when they see them— The miles of the harvest White in the sunshine, Rushing and stumbling, With the mighty and clamorous Cry of a people Starved from creation, Hurl themselves onward, Deep in the wheat-fields, Weeping like children, After ages and ages, Back at the breasts Of their mother the earth.
Night in the valley, Gloom on the mountain, Wind in the wheat, Far to the southward The flutter of lightning, The shudder of thunder; But high at the zenith, A cluster of stars Glimmers and throbs In the grasp of the midnight, Steady and absolute, Ancient and sure.
The winds that on the uplands softly lie, Grow keener where the ice is lingering still, Where the first robin on the sheltered hill Pipes blithely to the tune, “When Spring goes by!” Hear him again, “Spring! Spring!” he seems to cry, Haunting the fall of the flute-throated rill, That keeps a gentle, constant, silver thrill, While he is restless in his ecstasy.
Ah! the soft budding of the virginal woods, Of the frail fruit trees by the vanishing lakes: There’s the new moon where the clear sunset floods, A trace of dew upon the rose leaf sky; And hark! what rapture the glad robin wakes— “When Spring goes by; Spring! Spring! When Spring goes by.”