When suns afoot are marching, And rains are quick and strong, And streams speak in a whisper, I know the days are long. When hills are clad in velvet, And winds can do no wrong, And woods are deep and dusky, I know the days are long.
In the urgent solitudes Lies the spur to larger moods; In the friendship of the trees Dwell all sweet serenities.
Room for the children out of doors, For heads of gold or gloom; For raspberry lips and rose-leaf cheeks and palms, Make room--make room!
Room for the springtime out of doors, For buds in green or bloom; For every brown bare-handed country weed Make room--make room!
Room for earth’s sweetest out of doors, And for its worst a tomb; For housed-up griefs and fears, and scorns, and sighs, No room--no room!
Against my window-pane He plunges at a mass Of buds--and strikes in vain The intervening glass.
O sprite of wings and fire Outstretching eagerly, My soul with like desire To probe thy mystery,
Comes close as breast to bloom, As bud to hot heart-beat, And gains no inner room, And drains no hidden sweet.
But yesterday all faint for breath, The Summer laid her down to die; And now her frail ghost wandereth In every breeze that loiters by. Her wilted prisoners look up, As wondering who hath broke their chain, Too deep they drank of summer’s cup, They have no strength to rise again.
How swift the trees, their mistress gone, Enrobe themselves for revelry! Ungovernable winds upon The wold are dancing merrily. With crimson fruits and bursting nuts, And whirling leaves and flushing streams, The spirit of September cuts Adrift from August’s languid dreams.
A little while the revellers Shall flame and flaunt and have their day, And then will come the messengers Who travel on a cloudy way. And after them a form of light, A sense of iron in the air, Upon the pulse a touch of might And winter’s legions everywhere.
Unleaved, undrooping, still, they stand, This stanch and patient pilgrim band; October robbed them of their fruit, November stripped them to the root, The winter smote their helplessness With furious ire and stormy stress, And now they seem almost to stand In sight of Summer’s Promised Land.
Yet seen through frosty window-panes, When bared and bound in wintry chains, Their lightsome spirits seemed to play With February as with May. The snow that turned the skies afrown Enwrapt them in the softest down, And rains that dulled the landscape o’er But left them livelier than before.
