Sweet Fern

THE SUBTLE power in perfume found

Nor priest nor sibyl vainly learned;

On Grecian shrine or Aztec mound

No censer idly burned.

That power the old-time worships knew,

The Corybantes’ frenzied dance,

The Pythian priestess swooning through

The wonderland of trance.

And Nature holds, in wood and field,

Her thousand sunlit censers still;

To spells of flower and shrub we yield

Against or with our will.

I climbed a hill path strange and new

With slow feet, pausing at each turn;

A sudden waft of west wind blew

The breath of the sweet fern.

That fragrance from my vision swept

The alien landscape; in its stead,

Up fairer hills of youth I stepped,

As light of heart as tread.

I saw my boyhood’s lakelet shine

Once more through rifts of woodland shade;

I knew my river’s winding line

By morning mist betrayed.

With me June’s freshness, lapsing brook,

Murmurs of leaf and bee, the call

Of birds, and one in voice and look

In keeping with them all.

A fern beside the way we went

She plucked, and, smiling, held it up,

While from her hand the wild, sweet scent

I drank as from a cup.

O potent witchery of smell!

The dust-dry leaves to life return,

And she who plucked them owns the spell

And lifts her ghostly fern.

Or sense or spirit? Who shall say

What touch the chord of memory thrills?

It passed, and left the August day

Ablaze on lonely hills.

1884.