The shout and battle of the gale, The stillness of the sun-rising, The sound of some deep hidden spring, The glad sob of the filling sail,
The first green ripple of the wheat, The rain-song of the lifted leaves, The waking birds beneath the eaves, The voices of the summer heat.
O Nature! I do not aspire To be the highest in thy choir,-- To be a meteor in thy sky, Or comet that may range on high; Only a zephyr that may blow Among the reeds by the river low; Give me thy most privy place Where to run my airy race.
In some withdrawn, unpublic mead Let me sigh upon a reed, Or in the woods, with leafy din, Whisper the still evening in: Some still work give me to do,-- Only--be it near to you!
For I'd rather be thy child And pupil, in the forest wild, Than be the king of men elsewhere, And most sovereign slave of care; To have one moment of thy dawn, Than share the city's year forlorn.
Mine are the night and morning, The pits of air, the gull of space, The sportive sun, the gibbous moon, The innumerable days.
I hide in the solar glory, I am dumb in the pealing song, I rest on the pitch of the torrent, In slumber I am strong.
No numbers have counted my tallies, No tribes my house can fill, I sit by the shining Fount of Life And pour the deluge still;
And ever by delicate powers Gathering along the centuries From race on race the rarest flowers, My wreath shall nothing miss.
And many a thousand summers My gardens ripened well, And light from meliorating stars With firmer glory fell.
I wrote the past in characters Of rock and fire the scroll, The building in the coral sea, The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings And broken stars I drew, And out of spent and aged things I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival, Tricked out in star and flower, And in cramp elf and saurian forms They swathed their too much power.
Time and Thought were my surveyors, They laid their courses well, They boiled the sea, and piled the layers Of granite, marl and shell.
But he, the man-child glorious,-- Where tarries he the while? The rainbow shines his harbinger, The sunset gleams his smile.
My boreal lights leap upward, Forthright my planets roll, And still the man-child is not born, The summit of the whole.