polyphone
  The flute-voice in the world of tone. 
      Sweet friends,
      Man’s love ascends
  To finer and diviner ends
  Than man’s mere thought e’er comprehends. 
      For I, e’en I,
      As here I lie,
  A petal on a harmony,
  Demand of Science whence and why
  Man’s tender pain, man’s inward cry,
  When he doth gaze on earth and sky? 
  Behold, I grow more bold: 
      I hold
  Full powers from Nature manifold. 
  I speak for each no-tongued tree
  That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
  And dumbly and most wistfully
  His mighty prayerful arms outspreads
  Above men’s oft-unheeding heads,
  And his big blessing downward sheds. 
  I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves,
  Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
  Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
  Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes,
  And briery mazes bounding lanes,
  And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
  And milky stems and sugary veins;
  For every long-armed woman-vine
  That round a piteous tree doth twine;
  For passionate odors, and divine
  Pistils, and petals crystalline;
  All purities of shady springs,
  All shynesses of film-winged things
  That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings;
  All modesties of mountain-fawns
  That leap to covert from wild lawns,
  And tremble if the day but dawns;
  All sparklings of small beady eyes
  Of birds, and sidelong glances wise
  Wherewith the jay hints tragedies;
  All piquancies of prickly burs,
  And smoothnesses of downs and furs
  Of eiders and of minevers;
  All limpid honeys that do lie
  At stamen-bases, nor deny
  The humming-birds’ fine roguery,
  Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly;
  All gracious curves of slender wings,
  Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiralings,
  Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings;
  Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell
  Wherewith in every lonesome dell
  Time to himself his hours doth tell;
  All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones,
  Wind-sighings, doves’ melodious moans,
  And night’s unearthly undertones;
  All placid lakes and waveless deeps,
  All cool reposing mountain-steeps,
  Vale-calms and tranquil lotos-sleeps;
  Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights,
  And warmths, and mysteries, and mights,
  Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights,—­
 —­These doth my timid tongue present,
  Their mouthpiece and lead instrument
  And servant, all love-eloquent. 
  I heard, when ‘All for love’ the violins cried: 
  Nature through me doth take their human side. 
  That soul is like a groom without a bride
  That ne’er by Nature in great love hath sighed. 
  Much time is run, and man hath changed his ways,
  Since Nature, in the antique fable-days,
  Was hid from man’s true love by proxy fays,
  False fauns and rascal gods that stole