Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/403

THE SONGSTER I hang him in the porch, that he may hear

The voices of the bobolink and thrush,

The robin's joyous gush,

The bluebird's warble, and the tunes of all

Glad matin songsters in the fields anear.

Then, as the blithe responses vary,

And rise anew and fall,

In every hush

He answers them again,

With his own wild, reliant strain,

As if he breathed the air of sweet Canary.

II

Bird, bird of the golden wing,

Thou lithe, melodious thing!

Where hast thy music found?

What fantasies of vale and vine,

Of glades where orchids intertwine,

Of palm-trees, garlanded and crowned,

And forests flooded deep with sound,—

What high imagining

Hath made this carol thine?

By what instinct art thou bound

To all rare harmonies that be

In those green islands of the sea,

Where thy radiant, wildwood kin

Their madrigals at morn begin,

Above the rainbow and the roar

Of the long billow from the Afric shore?

Asking other guerdon

None, than Heaven's light,

Holding thy crested head aright,

Thy melody's sweet burden

Thou dost proudly utter,

With many an ecstatic flutter 373