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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Grace Hazard Conkling

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

To the Mexican Nightingale

Grace Hazard Conkling

El Clarin

CLARIN, from what glens of air

Chime your cameo-colored bells?

When they ring, I know them rare,

Fluted like the lips of shells

For the tone to ripple down,

Honey-pale or amber-brown.

When the tawny evening spills

Drops of topaz down the pine,

Light denied the dusking hills,

Do you gather and confine

In some clear aerial jar,

On the branch where flits the star?

Do you pour the liquid light

Early from your lyric urn?

Nay, it was at midmost night

That I heard among the fern

Golden drops that fell in showers,

Shaken down as out of flowers!

When the rain of light was gone,

Poured in rhyming gold like rain,

How your elfin bells at dawn

Delicately chimed again,

Soft as sea-shells murmur of

Her whose lovely name is Love!

Did the Foam-born brim those bells

With the wistful melodies

Of enchanted vocal shells?

Does the satin sigh of trees

Bring a memory of foam?

Clarin, do you sing of home?