Storm (Archibald Lampman Poems)
Out of the gray northwest, where many a day gone by Ye tugged and howled in your tempestuous grot, And evermore the huge frost giants lie, Your wizard guards in vigilance unforgot, Out of the gray northwest, for now the bonds are riven, On wide white wings your thongless flight is driven, That lulls but resteth not. And all the gray day long, and all the dense wild night, Ye wheel and hurry with the sheeted snow, By cedared waste and many a pine-dark height, Across white rivers frozen fast below; Over the lonely forests, where the flowers yet sleeping Turn in their narrow beds with dreams of weeping In some remembered woe; Across the unfenced wide marsh levels, where the dry Brown ferns sigh out, and last year's sedges scold In some drear language, rustling haggardly Their thin dead leaves and dusky hoods of gold; Across gray beechwoods where the pallid leaves unfalling In the blind gusts like homeless ghosts are calling With voices cracked and old; Across the solitary clearings, where the low Fierce gusts howl through the blinded woods, and round The buried shanties all day long the snow Sifts and piles up in many a spectral mound; Across lone villages in eerie wildernesses Whose hidden life no living shape confesses Nor any human sound; Across the serried masses of dim cities, blown Full of the snow that ever shifts and swells, While far above them all their towers of stone Stand and beat back your fierce and tyrannous spells, And hour by hour send out, like voices torn and broken Of battling giants that have grandly spoken, The veering sound of bells; So day and night, O Wind, with hiss and moan you fleet, Where once long gone on many a green-leafed day Your gentler brethren wandered with light feet And sang, with voices soft and sweet as they, The same blind thought that you with wilder might are speaking, Seeking the same strange thing that you are seeking In this your stormier way. O Wind, wild-voicèd brother, in your northern cave, My spirit also being so beset With pride and pain, I heard you beat and rave, Grinding your chains with furious howl and fret, Knowing full well that all earth's moving things inherit The same chained might and madness of the spirit, That none may quite forget. You in your cave of snows, we in our narrow girth Of need and sense, for ever chafe and pine; Only in moods of some demonic birth Our souls take fire, our flashing wings untwine; Even like you, mad Wind, above our broken prison, With streaming hair and maddened eyes uprisen, We dream ourselves divine; Mad moods that come and go in some mysterious way, That flash and fall, none knoweth how or why, O Wind, our brother, they are yours today, The stormy joy, the sweeping mastery; Deep in our narrow cells, we hear you, we awaken, With hands afret and bosoms strangely shaken, We answer to your cry. I most that love you, Wind, when you are fierce and free, In these dull fetters cannot long remain; Lo, I will rise and break my thongs and flee Forth to your drift and beating, till my brain Even for an hour grow wild in your divine embraces, And then creep back into mine earthly traces, And bind me with my chain. Nay, Wind, I hear you, desperate brother, in your might Whistle and howl; I shall not tarry long, And though the day be blind and fierce, the night Be dense and wild, I still am glad and strong To meet you face to face; through all your gust and drifting With brow held high, my joyous hands uplifting, I cry you song for song.(Archibald Lampman)