The Garden of Years and Other Poems/The Débutante

To-day dawned not upon the earth as other days have done: A throng of little virgin clouds stood waiting for the sun, Till the herald-winds aligned them, and they blushed, and stood aside, As the marshals of the morning flung the eastern portals wide. So Nature lit her playhouse for the play that May begins, And the twigs of honeysuckle sawed like little violins: In the dawn there dwelt a whisper of a presence that was new, For the slender Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

As yet I could not see her, and the stage was wide and bare; As yet the Winter's chorus echoed faintly on the air With a dying wail of tempest, and of dry and tortured trees, But a promise of new music lent enchantment to the breeze. In the scene's secluded corners lay the snow-drifts, still secure; But the murmur of their melting sang another overture Than the brooks of brown November, and I listened, and I knew That blue-eyed Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

The world was all attention, and the hemlocks stood, a-row, Ushers, never changing costume through the Seasons’ wonder-show, While the day, below the hillside, tried her colors, one by one, On the clouds experimenting, till the coming of the sun. In the vines about my window, where the sparrows all convene, They were practising the chorus that should usher in the Queen, And the sod-imprisoned flowers craved the word to shoulder through: Green-girdled Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!

She shall enter to the clarion of the crystal-ringing brooks, She shall tread on frail arbutus in the moist and mossy nooks; She shall touch the bleak drop-curtain of the Winter with her wand Till it lifts, and shows the wonder of the apple blooms beyond! Yet with all her golden sunlight, and her twilights of perfume, Yet with all the mystic splendor of her nights of starlit gloom, She shall bring no sweeter moment than this one in which I knew That laughing Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue! , 1902.