Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Lyra Vernalis

Arthur Johnson

OFT have I seen you, lovely as of old

Though Winter still forbade your birds to sing,

Steal by the silent houses barred to cold,

Around a sunlit corner vanishing.

With hooded face and mantle gray, few know

How in these peopled days you pass

With hesitant comings, hastenings away,

Through every street, by every stretch of grass,

From wood to distant wood, where’er you go,

To gaze upon some frozen spot

And bid the frost depart,

Of many a gentle thing to feel the heart,

Judging the days before that pulse shall leap

Fresh out of sleep,

Sudden awake

To glow and merrymake

In tune with the gay measure of its lot.

So have I waited long today, for sure

This happy sun, this wealth of southern air,

This desolation made by sleep more pure,

This emptiness, will tempt you forth to fare

And earth will wake once more.

Now is the first sweet respite of the year;

Too long, too long have you been stranger here—

Too long you tarry now—so soon before

New storms with freshened force will rage;

O Spring, what keeps you now!

When every tree, when every naked bough

Needs your assurance, when all spent things wait

In fear which but your coming would assuage:—

Spring, Spring—be not too late!

The trodden soil conceals no trace of you

Whose footprint I could tell in any place.

And yet, methought that maid with raiment blue

Who fled so fast, had a familiar face—

Some look of youth the Winter failed to heed

Perhaps; and now yon sapling is more green.

What laughter is it, from what source unseen

Came that low mocking shout? Behold a steed

Leaps as if happy to be driven

Along the winged way!

Oh, am I mad or did his driver gay

Lean from that dirty cart to wave farewell—

A finger to her lips as warning given

Lest I her secret tell?

Across wet meadows where the wild thyme sleeps,

Where lonely pools are forming in the sedge,

I fain would track you past the ice-hung steeps

Along the sinuous river’s melting edge,

To where alone there is a little hollow.

A slender streamlet trickles from the ground,

And stooping over it you gaze around

To see what charmed thing perchance may follow.

There kneeling on the early mud

At last, O Spring, at last,

Would I might come upon you silently!—

My arm about your shivering shoulders passed,

My hand beneath the head thrown back for me,

For me the breast a-flower in every bud,—

The eyes of ecstasy!

Why must your journey in such desperate haste

Without another curious glance behind?

There is a promise in this barren waste,

And from that southern way you went the wind

Brings an old fragrance back to things bereft

Of all old fragrances. Alas, too soon

Fall the long shadows of the afternoon.

With fingers deft

Dusk lights the stars in heaven’s pale gulf of blue.

Where, where are you

Who should on earth make the sky’s vision true?

Now, even, have you sought that couch you left,

Where, when clouds ominously rise,

Dreaming, you may forget

How late will bloom the timid violet?

Or on some quiet height, perhaps, you stand—

To view afar, with passion-laden eyes,

The desolated land.