A GROUP OF BIRD POEMS

THE SKYLARK

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was born in England three years before John Keats. Shelley is one of the great English lyric poets. Although his verse is often ethereal, airy, intangible, he loves to identify himself with the animating spirit of nature, the spirit which he finds so manifest in the skylark, night, and the west wind. No one surpasses him in this field. He was drowned in the Bay of Spezzia, Italy, the year after Keats died, and buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, not far from Keats. See also:

Halleck's New English Literature, pp. 416-425, 446, 447.

Dowden's Life of Shelley.

Sharp's Life of Shelley.

WHAT objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

THE FIRST MOCKING BIRD IN SPRING 1

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE

1

Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-1886) was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He was educated for the profession of law, but devoted all his spare time to writing. In the Civil War, he lost both fortune and health. He spent his last years in a rude hut in the woods of Georgia, where he wrote many of his best poems. His poetry is musical, and shows an intimate love of nature. See also:

Halleck's History of American Literature, pp. 311, 312, 337.
Pickett's Literary Hearthstones of Dixie.

Edward Mims in Library of Southern Literature.

1 Used by special arrangement with Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard Company, publishers of Hayne's Poetical Works.

THE wren and the field lark listen

To the gush from their laureate's throat;
And the bluebird stops on the oak to catch
Each rounded and perfect note.

The sparrow, his pert head reared aloft,
Has ceased to chirp in the grassy croft,
And is bending the curves of his tiny ear
In the pose of a critic wise, to hear.
A blackbird, perched on a glistening gum,
Seems lost in a rapture, deep and dumb;
And as eagerly still in his trancèd hush,
'Mid the copse beneath, is a clear-eyed thrush.
No longer the dove by the thorn-tree root
Moans sad and soft as a far-off flute.

All Nature is hearkening, charmed and mute.

TAMPA ROBINS1

SIDNEY LANIER

Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) was born of an old, cultured family in Macon, Georgia. He served four years in the Confederate army, was imprisoned, and suffered many hardships. After six years of struggle with ill health and hard study, he was appointed lecturer on English literature at Johns Hopkins University. He died two years later. In some of his poetry he has never been surpassed by any American poet. See also:

Halleck's History of American Literature, pp. 313-317, 338.

Edward Mims's Sidney Lanier.

Burt's The Lanier Book.

Ward's Memorial of Sidney Lanier, in Poems by Sidney Lanier, edited by his wife.

THE robin laughed in the orange tree:
"Ho, windy North, a fig for thee:

1 From Poems by Sidney Lanier, copyright, 1884, 1891, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Used by special arrangement with the publishers.

While breasts are red and wings are bold
And green trees wave us globes of gold,
Time's scythe shall reap but bliss for me
Sunlight, song, and the orange tree.

"Burn, golden globes in leafy sky,
My orange planets: crimson I

Will shine and shoot among the spheres
(Blithe meteor that no mortal fears)
And thrid the heavenly orange tree
With orbits bright of minstrelsy.

"If that I hate wild winter's spite-
The gibbet trees, the world in white,
The sky but gray wind over a grave
Why should I ache, the season's slave?
I'll sing from the top of the orange tree
Gramercy, winter's tyranny.

"I'll south with the sun, and keep my clime;
My wing is king of the summer time;

My breast to the sun his torch shall hold;
And I'll call down through the green and gold
Time, take thy scythe, reap bliss for me,
Bestir thee under the orange tree."

THE WHIPPOORWILL 1

MADISON J. CAWEIN

Madison J. Cawein (1865-1914), the poet, was born in Louisville, Kentucky. From early boyhood he wrote verse. Even his graduation speech at the high school was a poem, which awakened much interest. Probably no American poet of his day received more European recog

1 Copyright, 1910. Used by special arrangement with the author and The Macmillan Company.

nition. He published several volumes of poems, all of which show rare imaginative power and an exquisite appreciation of nature. See also:

Halleck's History of American Literature, pp. 332-334, 338.

Trent's Southern Writers, pp. 332-378.

Townsend's Kentucky in American Letters, Vol. II, pp. 187–198. Review of Reviews, Recent Verse, Vol. 47, pp. 370-373 (March, 1913).

ABOVE lone woodland ways that led
To dells the stealthy twilights tread
The west was hot geranium red;
And still, and still,

Along old lanes the locusts sow

With clustered pearls the Maytimes know,

Deep in the crimson afterglow,

We heard the homeward cattle low,

And then the far-off, far-off woe

Of "whippoorwill!" of "whippoorwill!"

Beneath the idle beechen boughs

We heard the far bells of the cows

Come slowly jangling toward the house;
And still, and still,

Beyond the light that would not die
Out of the scarlet-haunted sky;
Beyond the evening-star's white eye
Of glittering chalcedony,

Drained out of dusk the plaintive cry
Of "whippoorwill," of "whippoorwill."

And in the city oft, when swims

The pale moon o'er the smoke that dims
Its disk, I dream of wildwood limbs;

And still, and still,

I seem to hear, where shadows grope

'Mid ferns and flowers that dewdrops rope,

H. & B. READINGS - IO