I say, The Earth is alway glad, yea, and the sea Is glad alway When the rain cometh; either tranquilly As at the first dawn of a summer day Or in late autumn wildly passionate, Or when all things are all disconsolate Because that Winter has been long their king, Or in the Spring. —Therefore let now your joyful thanksgiving Be heard on Earth because the Rain hath come! While land and sea give praise, shall ye be dumb? Shall ye alone await the sun-shining? Your days, perchance, have many joys to bring; Perchance with woes they shall be burthensome; Yet when night cometh, and ye journey home, Weary, and sore, and stained with travelling, When ye seek out your homes because the night— The last, dark night—falls swift across your path, And on Life’s altar your last day lies slain, Will ye not cry aloud with that new might One dying with great things unfinished hath, "O God! if Thou wouldst only send Thy Rain!"
You are not with me though the Spring is here! And yet it seemed to-day as if the Spring Were the same one that in an ancient year Came suddenly upon our wandering.
You must remember all that chanced that day. Can you forget the shy awaking call Of the first robin?—And the foolish way The squirrel ran along the low stone wall?
The half-retreating sound of water breaking, Hushing, falling; while the pine-laden breeze Told us the tumult many crows were making Amid innumerable distant trees;
The certain presence of the birth of things Around, above, beneath, us,—everywhere; The soft return of immemorial Springs Thrilling with life the fragrant forest air;
All these were with us then. Can you forget? Or must you—even as I—remember well? To-day, all these were with me, there,—and yet They seemed to have some bitter thing to tell;
They looked with questioning eyes, and seemed to wait One’s doubtful coming whom of old they knew; Till, seeing me alone and desolate, They learned how vain was strong desire of you.
Far off, to eastward, I see the wide hill sloping Up to the place where the pines and sky are one; All the hill is gray with its young budding birches And red with its maple-tips and yellow with the sun.
Sometimes, over it rolls a purple shadow Of a ragged cloud that wanders in the large, open sky, Born where the ploughed fields border on the river And melting into space where the pines are black and high.