Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/333

 THE FRESHET

year our Equinoctial came along

Ere the snow left us. Under mountain pines

White drifts lay frozen like the dead, and down

Through many a gorge the bristling hemlocks crossed

Their spears above the ice-enfettered brooks;

But the pent river wailed, through prison walls,

For freedom and the time to rend its chains.

At last it came: five days a drenching rain

Flooded the country; snow-drifts fell away;

The brooks grew rivers, and the river here—

A ravenous, angry torrent—tore up banks,

And overflowed the meadows, league on league.

Great cakes of ice, four-square, with mounds of hay,

Fence-rails, and scattered drift-wood, and huge beams

From broken dams above us, mill-wheel ties,

Smooth lumber, and the torn-up trunks of trees,

Swept downward, strewing all the land about.

Sometimes the flood surrounded, unawares,

Stray cattle, or a flock of timorous sheep,

And bore them with it, straggling, till the ice

Beat shape and being from them. You know how

These freshets scour our valleys. So it raged

A night and day; but when the day grew night

The storm fell off; lastly, the sun went down

Quite clear of clouds, and ere he came again

The flood began to lower.

Through the rise

We men had been at work, like water-sprites, 303