The Black Birds

I Once, only once,

I saw it clear, —That Eden every human heart has dreamedA hundred times, but always far away!

Ah, well do I remember how it seemed,

Through the still

Of that enchanted day,

To lie wide open to my weary feet:

A little land of love and joy and rest,

With meadows of soft green,

Rosy with cyclamen, and

With delicate breath of violets unseen, —And, tranquil 'mid the

As if it waited for a coming guest,

A little house of peace and joy and

Was nested like a snow-white dove From the rough mountain where I stood,

Homesick for happiness,

Only a narrow valley and a darkling wood To cross, and then the long

Of solitude would be forever past, —I should be home at last.

But not too soon! oh, let me linger here And feed my eyes, hungry with sorrow,

On all this loveliness, so near,

And mine to-morrow!

Then, from the wood, across the silvery blue,

A dark bird flew,

Silent, with sable wings.

Close in his wake another came, —Fragments of midnight floating

The sunset flame, —Another and another, weaving

Of blackness on the primrose sky, —Another, and another, look, a score,

A hundred, yes, a thousand rising

From that accursed, dumb, and ancient wood, —They boiled into the lucid

Like smoke from some deep caldron of despair!

And more, and more, and ever more,

The numberless, ill-omened brood,

Flapping their ragged plumes,

Possessed the landscape and the evening

With menaces and glooms.

Oh, dark, dark, dark they hovered o'er the

Where once I saw the little house so

Amid the flowers, covering every

Of beauty from my troubled sight, —And suddenly it was night!

II At break of day I crossed the wooded vale;

And while the morning madeA trembling light among the tree-tops pale,

I saw the sable birds on every limb,

Clinging together closely in the shade,

And croaking placidly their surly hymn.

But, oh, the little land of peace and

That those night-loving wings had poised above, —Where was it gone?

Lost, lost forevermore!

Only a cottage, dull and gray,

In the cold light of dawn,

With iron bars across the door:

Only a garden where the withering heads Of flowers, presaging decay,

Hung over barren beds:

Only a desolate field that lay Untilled beneath the desolate day, —Where Eden seemed to bloom I found but these!

So, wondering,

I passed along my way,

With anger in my heart, too deep for words,

Against that grove of evil-sheltering trees,

And the black magic of the croaking birds.