ROUND clouds roll in the arms of the
wind,
The round
earth rolls in a clasp of blue sky,
And see, where the budding hazels are
thinned,
The wild anemones lie
In undulating shivers beneath
the wind.
Over the blue of the waters
ply
White ducks, a
living flotilla of cloud;
And, look you, floating just
thereby,
The blue-gleamed drake stems
proud
Like Abraham,
whose seed should multiply.
In the lustrous gleam of the water,
there
Scramble seven
toads across the silk, obscure leaves,
Seven toads that meet in the dusk to
share
The darkness that
interweaves
The sky
and earth and water and live things
everywhere.
Look now, through the woods where
the beech-green
spurts
Like a storm of emerald snow, look,
see
A great bay stallion dances, skirts
The bushes sumptuously,
Going outward now in the spring
to his brief deserts.
Ah love, with your rich, warm face
aglow,
What sudden
expectation opens you
So wide as you watch the
catkins blow
Their dust from the birch on the
blue
Lift of the
pulsing wind — ah, tell me you know!
Ah, surely! Ah, sure from the golden
sun
A quickening,
masculine gleam floats in to all
Us creatures, people and
flowers undone,
Lying open under his
thrall,
As he begets
the year in us. What, then, would you
shun?
Why, I should think that from the
earth there fly
Fine
thrills to the neighbour stars, fine yellow beams
Thrown
lustily off from our full-blown, high
Bursting globe of
dreams,
To quicken
the spheres that are virgin still in the
sky.
Do you not hear each morsel
thrill
With joy at
travelling to plant itself within
The expectant one, therein to
instil
New rapture, new shape to
win,
From the thick
of life wake up another will?
Surely, and if that I would
spill
The vivid, ah,
the fiery surplus of life,
From off my brimming measure,
to fill
You, and flush you rife
With increase, do you call it
evil, and always evil?