The Forest Spring

Push back the brambles, berry-blue: The hollowed spring is full in view: Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern Its rock-embedded, crystal urn. Not for the loneliness that keeps The coigne wherein its silence sleeps; Not for wild butterflies that sway Their pansy pinions all the day Above its mirror; nor the bee, Nor dragon-fly, that passing see Themselves reflected in its spar; Not for the one white liquid star, That twinkles in its firmament; Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent Athwart it when the kindly night Beads all its grasses with the light Small jewels of the dimpled dew; Not for the day's inverted blue Nor the quaint, dimly coloured stones That dance within it where it moans: Not for all these I love to sit In silence and to gaze in it. But, know, a nymph with merry eyes Looks at me from its laughing skies; A graceful glimmering nymph who plays All the long fragrant summer days With instant sights of bees and birds, And speaks with them in water words, And for whose nakedness the air Weaves moony mists, and on whose hair, Unfilleted, the night will set That lone star as a coronet.