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| WHAT things for dream there are when spectre-like, | |
| Moving among tall haycocks lightly piled, | |
| I enter alone upon the stubble field, | |
| From which the laborers’ voices late have died, | |
| And in the antiphony of afterglow | 5 |
| And rising full moon, sit me down | |
| Upon the full moon’s side of the first haycock | |
| And lose myself amid so many alike. | |
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| I dream upon the opposing lights of the hour, | |
| Preventing shadow until the moon prevail; | 10 |
| I dream upon the night-hawks peopling heaven, | |
| Each circling each with vague unearthly cry, | |
| Or plunging headlong with fierce twang afar; | |
| And on the bat’s mute antics, who would seem | |
| Dimly to have made out my secret place, | 15 |
| Only to lose it when he pirouettes, | |
| And seek it endlessly with purblind haste; | |
| On the last swallow’s sweep; and on the rasp | |
| In the abyss of odor and rustle at my back, | |
| That, silenced by my advent, finds once more, | 20 |
| After an interval, his instrument, | |
| And tries once—twice—and thrice if I be there; | |
| And on the worn book of old-golden song | |
| I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold | |
| And freshen in this air of withering sweetness; | 25 |
| But on the memory of one absent most, | |
| For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye. | |
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