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I1.
Breathers of wisdom won without a quest,
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Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange;
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Flutists of lands where beauty hath no change,
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And wintry grief is a forgotten guest,
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Sweet murmurers of everlasting rest,
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For whom glad days have ever yet to run,
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And moments are as aeons, and the sun
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But ever sunken half-way toward the west.1.
Often to me who heard you in your day,
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With close rapt ears, it could not choose but seem
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That earth, our mother, searching in what way
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Men's hearts might know her spirit's inmost-dream;
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Ever at rest beneath life's change and stir,
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Made you her soul, and bade you pipe for her.II2.
In those mute days when spring was in her glee,
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And hope was strong, we knew not why or how,
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And earth, the mother, dreamed with brooding brow,
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Musing on life, and what the hours might be,
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When love should ripen to maternity,
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Then like high flutes in silvery interchange
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Ye piped with voices still and sweet and strange,
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And ever as ye piped, on every tree2.
The great buds swelled; among the pensive woods
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The spirits of first flowers awoke and flung
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From buried faces the close-fitting hoods,
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And listened to your piping till they fell,
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The frail spring-beauty with her perfumed bell,
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The wind-flower, and the spotted adder-tongue.III3.
All the day long, wherever pools might be
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Among the golden meadows, where the air
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Stood in a dream, as it were moorèd there
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For ever in a noon-tide reverie,
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Or where the birds made riot of their glee
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In the still woods, and the hot sun shone down,
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Crossed with warm lucent shadows on the brown
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Leaf-paven pools, that bubbled dreamily, 3.
Or far away in whispering river meads
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And watery marshes where the brooding noon,
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Full with the wonder of its own sweet boon,
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Nestled and slept among the noiseless reeds,
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Ye sat and murmured, motionless as they,
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With eyes that dreamed beyond the night and day.IV4.
And when day passed and over heaven's height,
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Thin with the many stars and cool with dew,
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The fingers of the deep hours slowly drew
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The wonder of the ever-healing night,
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No grief or loneliness or rapt delight
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Or weight of silence ever brought to you
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Slumber or rest; only your voices grew
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More high and solemn; slowly with hushed flight4.
Ye saw the echoing hours go by, long-drawn,
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Nor ever stirred, watching with fathomless eyes,
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And with your countless clear antiphonies
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Filling the earth and heaven, even till dawn,
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Last-risen, found you with its first pale gleam,
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Still with soft throats unaltered in your dream.V5.
And slowly as we heard you, day by day,
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The stillness of enchanted reveries
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Bound brain and spirit and half-closèd eyes,
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In some divine sweet wonder-dream astray;
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To us no sorrow or upreared dismay
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Nor any discord came, but evermore
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The voices of mankind, the outer roar,
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Grew strange and murmurous, faint and far away. 5.
Morning and noon and midnight exquisitely,
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Rapt with your voices, this alone we knew,
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Cities might change and fall, and men might die,
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Secure were we, content to dream with you
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That change and pain are shadows faint and fleet,
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And dreams are real, and life is only sweet.
Archibald Lampman
Read poems about / on: change, dream, grief, spring, mother, beauty, heaven, flower, sun, river, sorrow, silence, hope, pain, wind, alone, city, frog, rose, running
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Archibald Lampman
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