Not a bird-song, but it has for fellow
Some-wood-flower, its speechless counterpart,
Form and color moulded to one cadence,
To voice something of the wild mute heart.

Thrushes, we’ll suppose, have for their tune-mates
The gold languorous lilies of the glade;
And the whippoorwill, that plaintive dreamer,
Some dark purple flower that loves the shade.

The song-sparrow tells me what the clover
Nods about beneath the gorgeous blue;
While the snowballs tell me old love-stories
Thistle-birds half hinted as they flew.

April’s faith, in robin at his vespers,
Breathes a prayer too in my lilac blooms. 
What the cloudy asters told the hillside,
My lone rainbird in the dusk resumes.

Bobolink is voice for apple blossom,
Breezy, abundant, good for human joys;
Oriole has touched the burning secret
Poppies hide with their deliberate poise.

Tiny twin-flowers, what are they but fancies,
Subtler than a field-lark can express? 
Swallows make the low contented twitter
Lying just beyond the pansies’ guess.

Yellowbird, the hot noon’s warbler, pierces
Sense where tiger-lilies may not pass. 
Are not crickets and all field-wise creatures
Brahmins of the universal grass?

Saffron butterflies and mute ephemera,
Doubt not, have their songs too, could we hear. 
Every raindrop is a sea sonorous
As the great worlds thundering sphere to sphere.

There’s no silence and no dark forever,
Clangoring suns to us are placid stars;
Swift-foot lightning with his henchman thunder
Lags behind these gnomes in Leyden jars.

Peal and flash and thrill and scent and savour
Pulse through rhythm to rapture, and control,—­
Who shall say how far along or finely?—­
The infinite tectonics of the soul.

Low-bred peoples, Hottentots, Basutos,
Have a taste for scarlet and brass bands. 
Our friend Monet, feeling red repulsive,
Sees blue shadows in pale purple lands.

Sees not only, but instructs our seeing;
Taught by him a twelvemonth, we confess
Earth once robed in crude barbaric splendor,
Has put on a softer lovelier dress.

Feast my eyes on some old Indian fabric,
Centuries of culture went to weave,
And I grow the fine fastidious artist,
No mere shop-made textile can deceive.

Red the bass and violet the treble,
Soul may pass out where all color ends. 
Ends?  So we say, meaning where the eyesight
With some yet unborn perception blends.

You, Amati, never saw a sunset,—­
Hear tornadoes in a spider’s loom;
I, at my wits’ end, may still develop
Unknown senses in life’s larger room.

Superhuman is not supernatural. 
How shall half-way judge of journey done? 
Shall this germ and protoplast of being
Rest mid-life and say his race is run?

Softly there, my Niccolo, a moment! 
Shall I then discard my simpler joys? 
No, for look you, every sense’s impulse
Is a means the master soul employs.