Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/373



first fair month! In singing Summer's sphere

She glows, the eldest daughter of the year.

All light, all warmth, all passion, breaths of myrrh,

And subtle hints of rose-lands, come with her.

She is the warm, live month of lustre—she

Makes glad the land and lulls the strong, sad sea.

The highest hope comes with her. In her face

Of pure, clear colour lives exalted grace;

Her speech is beauty, and her radiant eyes

Are eloquent with splendid prophecies.

bright-haired, blue-eyed last of Summer. Lo,

Her clear song lives in all the winds that blow;

The upland torrent and the lowland rill,

The stream of valley and the spring of hill,

The pools that slumber and the brooks that run

Where dense the leaves are, green the light of sun,

Take all her grace of voice and colour. She,

With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,

Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands. Far

And near her sweet gifts shine like star by star.

She is the true Demeter. Life of root

Glows under her in gardens flushed with fruit;

She fills the fields with strength and passion—makes

A fire of lustre on the lawn-ringed lakes;

Her beauty awes the great wild sea; the height

Of grey magnificence takes strange delight

And softens at her presence, at the dear

Sweet face whose memory beams through all the year.

upland voices, full of wind and stream,

Greet March, the sister of the flying beam

And speedy shadow. She, with rainbow crowned,

Lives in a sphere of songs of mazy sound.