Folk Song

When merry milkmaids to their cattle call

At evenfall

And voices range

Loud through the gloam from grange to quiet grange,

Wild waif-songs from long distant lands and loves,

Like migrant doves,

Wake and give wing

To passion dust-dumb lips were wont to sing.

The new still holds the old moon in her arms;

The ancient charms

Of dew and dusk

Still lure her nomad odors from the musk,

And, at each day's millennial eclipse,

On new men's lips,

Some old song starts,

Made of the music of millennial hearts,

Whereto one listens as from long ago

And learns to know

That one day's tears

And love and life are as a thousand years’,

And that some simple shepherd, singing of

His pain and love,

May haply find

His heart-song speaks the heart of all his kind.