To The Blackberry

Birds, Bees, and Berries/Paul de Longpre

I FIND thee by the country side,
With angry mailèd thorn;
When first with dreamy woods and skies
The summer time is born.

By every fence and woodland path

Thy milk-white blossom blows;
In lonely haunts of mist and dream,
The summer airs enclose.

And when the freighted August days
Far into Autumn lean;

Sweet, luscious, on the laden branch,
Thy ripened fruit is seen.

Dark gypsy of the glowing year,
Child of the sun and rain,
While dreaming by thy tangled path,

There comes to me again,

The memory of a happy boy,

Barefooted, freed from school,
Who plucked your rich lip-staining fruit,
By road-ways green and cool.

And tossed in glee his ragged cap,
With laughter to the sky;
Oblivious in the glow of youth,
How the mad world went by;

Nor cared in realms of summer time,

By haunts of bough and vine,
If Nicholas lost the Volga,
Or Bismark held the Rhine,

O time when shade with sun was blent,
So like an April shower;

Life has its flower and thorn and fruit,
But thou wert all its flower.

When every day Nepenthe lent,
To drown its deepest sorrow,
And evening skies but prophesied

A glorious skied to-morrow.

O, long gone days of sunlit youth,
I’d live through years of pain,
Once more life’s fate of thorn and fruit
To dream your flower again.

William Wilford Campbell