The ghost of Winter stalks amidst the boughs
Of Spring and drags along his icy shroud;
The corn flowers and the wheat, with broken vows,
Are now beneath the storm untimely bowed.

O Winter, thou wert buried on the hills;
Thine epitaph was written with melted snow;
Thy skeleton is in the barren rills,
Where once thy silvery life-blood used to flow.

Why visits the glimpses of the sun
So soon, what message bring’st thou from the dead?
Why rudely interrupt the children’s fun
And havoc among the Guests of Summer spread?

Behold, the branches shiver, the blossoms fall;
The lilac in the leaves a shelter seeks;
Thy savage winds the Queen of May appal,—
They pale with summer’s dust her rosy cheeks.

Withhold the solemn music of thy gale
Until the golden notes of Spring are spun;
The opera in the trees is but begun,
O, drown it not with thy benighted wail.

For thee May’s winged madonnas will not sing,
Nor in thy presence will they now appear:
Begone, that their sweet voices may we hear—
Begone, the world to-day belongs to Spring.

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
     All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
     One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
     “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
     One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
     One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
     One perfect rose.

I must be far from men and women
To love their ways.
I must be on a mountain
Breathing greatly like a tree
If my heart would yearn a little
For the peopled, placid valley.
I must be in a bare place
And lonely as a moon
To find the graceless ways of people
Worthful as a flower’s ways,
A flower that lives for loneliness
And dies when beauty dies.

I cannot find music
On the tongues of men and women
Unless I hear their voices
Like echoes, silence-softened.
Their many words mean little.
Their mouths are blatant sparrows.

I must be far from men and women,
As God is far away,
To keep my faith with Beauty,
My heart sweet towards them,
And love them with a god’s tranquility.

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
     And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
     And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
     Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,—
     And I wish I’d never met him.

My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,
     And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
     And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
     As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—
     And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,
     And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
     In the pathway of the morrows.
He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
     Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,—
     And I wish somebody’d shoot him.