THE MOTHER OF A POET

SHE is too kind, I think, for mortal things,

Too gentle for the gusty ways of earth;

God gave to her a shy and silver mirth,

And made her soul as clear

And softly singing as an orchard spring's

In sheltered hollows all the sunny year —

A spring that thru the leaning grass looks up

And holds all heaven in its clarid cup,

Mirror to holy meadows high and blue

With stars like drops of dew.

I love to think that never tears at night

Have made her eyes less bright;

That all her girlhood thru

Never a cry of love made over-tense

Her voice's innocence;

That in her hands have lain,

Flowers beaten by the rain,

And little birds before they learned to sing

Drowned in the sudden ecstasy of spring.

I love to think that with a wistful wonder

She held her baby warm against her breast;

That never any fear awoke whereunder

She shuddered at her gift, or trembled lest

Thru the great doors of birth

Here to a windy earth

She lured from heaven a half-unwilling guest.

She caught and kept his first vague flickering smile,

The faint upleaping of his spirit's fire;

And for a long sweet while

In her was all he asked of earth or heaven —

But in the end how far,

Past every shaken star,

Should leap at last that arrow-like desire,

His full-grown manhood's keen

Ardor toward the unseen

Dark mystery beyond the Pleiads seven.

And in her heart she heard

His first dim-spoken word —

She only of them all could understand,

Flushing to feel at last

The silence over-past,

Thrilling as tho’ her hand had touched God's hand.

But in the end how many words

Winged on a flight she could not follow,

Farther than skyward lark or swallow,

His lips should free to lands she never knew;

Braver than white sea-faring birds

With a fearless melody,

Flying over a shining sea,

A star-white song between the blue and blue.

Oh I have seen a lake as clear and fair

As it were molten air,

Lifting a lily upward to the sun.

How should the water know the glowing heart

That ever to the heaven lifts its fire,

A golden and unchangeable desire?

The water only knows

The faint and rosy glows

Of under-petals, opening apart.

Yet in the soul of earth,

Deep in the primal ground,

Its searching roots are wound,

And centuries have struggled toward its birth.

So, in the man who sings,

All of the voiceless horde

From the cold dawn of things

Have their reward;

All in whose pulses ran

Blood that is his at last,

From the first stooping man

Far in the winnowed past.

Out of the tumult of their love and mating

Each one created, seeing life was good —

Dumb, till at last the song that they were waiting

Breaks like brave April thru a wintry wood.

But what of her whose heart is troubled by it,

The mother who would soothe and set him free,

Fearing the song's storm-shaken ecstasy —

Oh, as the moon that has no power to quiet

The strong wind-driven sea.