Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/58

 Far from cramped walls may fading afternoon

Find me expectant on some rising lawn;

Often depressed in dewy grass at dawn,

Me, from sweet slumber underneath green boughs,

Ere the stars flee may forest matins rouse,

Afoot when the great sun in amber floods

Pours horizontal through the steaming woods

And windless fumes from early chimneys start

And many a cock-crow cheers the traveller's heart

Eager for aught the coming day afford

In hills untopped and valleys unexplored.

Give me the white road into the world's ends,

Lover of roadside hazard, roadside friends,

Loiterer oft by upland farms to gaze

On ample prospects, lost in glimmering haze

At noon, or where down odorous dales twilit,

Filled with low thundering of the mountain stream,

Over the plain where blue seas border it

The torrid coast-towns gleam.

I have fared too far to turn back now; my breast

Burns with the lust for splendors unrevealed,

Stars of midsummer, clouds out of the west,

Pallid horizons, winds that valley and field

Laden with joy, be ye my refuge still!

What though distress and poverty assail!

Though other voices chide, yours never will.

The grace of a blue sky can never fail.

Powers that my childhood with a spell so sweet, 8