Here we shall commune with her and no other;
    Care and the battle of life shall cease;
Men her degenerate children behind us,
Only the might of her beauty shall bind us,
  Full of rest, as we gaze on the face of our mother,
    Earth in the health and the strength of her peace.

MORNING ON THE LIEVRES

Far above us where a jay
Screams his matins to the day,
Capped with gold and amethyst,
Like a vapour from the forge
Of a giant somewhere hid,
Out of hearing of the clang
Of his hammer, skirts of mist
Slowly up the wooden gorge
Lift and hang.

Softly as a cloud we go,
Sky above and sky below,
Down the river, and the dip
Of the paddles scarcely breaks,
With the little silvery drip
Of the water as it shakes
From the blades, the crystal deep
Of the silence of the morn,
Of the forest yet asleep;
And the river reaches borne
In a mirror, purple grey,
Sheer away
To the misty line of light,
Where the forest and the stream
In a shadow meet and plight,
Like a dream.

From amid a stretch of reeds,
Where the lazy river sucks
All the water as it bleeds
From a little curling creek,
And the muskrats peer and sneak
In around the sunken wrecks
Of a tree that swept the skies
Long ago,
On a sudden seven ducks
With a splashy rustle rise,
Stretching out their seven necks,
One before, and two behind,
And the others all arow,
And as steady as the wind
With a snivelling whistle go,
Through the purple shadow led,
Till we only hear their whir
In behind a rocky spur,
Just ahead.

IN OCTOBER

Along the waste, a great way off, the pines,
  Like tall slim priests of storm, stand up and bar
The low long strip of dolorous red that lines
  The under west, where wet winds moan afar. 
The cornfields all are brown, and brown the meadows
  With the blown leaves’ wind-heaped traceries,
And the brown thistle stems that cast no shadows,
  And bear no bloom for bees.

As slowly earthward leaf by red leaf slips,
  The sad leaves rustle in chill misery,
A soft strange inner sound of pain-crazed lips,
  That move and murmur incoherently;
As if all leaves, that yet have breath, were sighing,
  With pale hushed throats, for death is at the door,
So many low soft masses for the dying
  Sweet leaves that live no more.

Here I will sit upon this naked stone,
  Draw my coat closer with my numbed hands,
And hear the ferns sigh, and the wet woods moan,
  And send my heart out to the ashen lands;
And I will ask myself what golden madness,
  What balmed breaths of dreamland spicery,
What visions of soft laughter and light sadness
  Were sweet last month to me.