My Garden

Albert Bierstadt/ A Rocky Cove

IF I could put my woods in song

And tell what's there enjoyed,

All men would to my gardens throng,

And leave the cities void.



In my plot no tulips blow,--

Snow-loving pines and oaks instead;

And rank the savage maples grow

From Spring's faint flush to Autumn red.



My garden is a forest ledge

Which older forests bound;

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,

Then plunge to depths profound.



Here once the Deluge ploughed,

Laid the terraces, one by one;

Ebbing later whence it flowed,

They bleach and dry in the sun.



The sowers made haste to depart,--

The wind and the birds which sowed it;

Not for fame, nor by rules of art,

Planted these, and tempests flowed it.



Waters that wash my garden-side

Play not in Nature's lawful web,

They heed not moon or solar tide,--

Five years elapse from flood to ebb.



Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,

And every god,--none did refuse;

And be sure at last came Love,

And after Love, the Muse.



Keen ears can catch a syllable,

As if one spake to another,

In the hemlocks tall, untamable,

And what the whispering grasses smother.



Æolian harps in the pine

Ring with the song of the Fates;

Infant Bacchus in the vine,--

Far distant yet his chorus waits.



Canst thou copy in verse one chime

Of the wood-bell's peal and cry,

Write in a book the morning's prime,

Or match with words that tender sky?



Wonderful verse of the gods,

Of one import, of varied tone;

They chant the bliss of their abodes

To man imprisoned in his own.



Ever the words of the gods resound;

But the porches of man's ear

Seldom in this low life's round

Are unsealed, that he may hear.



Wandering voices in the air

And murmurs in the wold

Speak what I cannot declare,

Yet cannot all withhold.



When the shadow fell on the lake,

The whirlwind in ripples wrote

Air-bells of fortune that shine and break,

And omens above thought.



But the meanings cleave to the lake,

Cannot be carried in book or urn;

Go thy ways now, come later back,

On waves and hedges still they burn.



These the fates of men forecast,

Of better men than live to-day;

If who can read them comes at last

He will spell in the sculpture,'Stay.'



Ralph Waldo Emerson