Poems (Forrest)/The lowland woman
THE LOWLAND WOMAN
Bird-bright were my eyes with watching, as beseemed a mountain-dweller,Where the besom of the ice-wind scours the clefts, a mist-expeller.Wise was I in wide-earth places, chinks in rocks, and eagles' nests;And the canny Alpine mosses clinging to the granites' crests.Half the world my window showed me. Past the pines in columns gloomy,Stunted firs the heights have mastered, and a plain-land far and roomy;Over there a glittering hamlet; over there a rimless sea—Till the woman left the lowland and came up the hills to me.
In her eyes were rushy meadows, kine among the dusky grasses;Weeds in mill-streams greenly swaying, where a swallow's shadow passes,On her bosom ruddy earth-stains, in her hands a valley rose;On her lips a store of perfumes, garnered where the lily grows. Slow she moved, like cloud at morning, when the south-wind idly dreams,And her presence breathed of woodlands and of drowsy sunlit streams;Not of edelweiss nor gentian, strangers of the upper air,But of violets damp in corners, pools set round with maiden-hair;Dancing lights on cabin windows, glow-worms burning in the dark;Treading down the crackling needles, 'twixt the pine-boles, brown and stark,Moving like a doomed to-morrow from the earth vales and the lea,With a red rose in her fingers she came up the hills to me.
For a space we spoke of valleys, for she liked my mountain eyes,And I set within her fillet one pale bloom of edelweiss,And I drank of earth-bees' honey in the hiving of her lips;Towns we talked instead of mountains, and instead of oceans, ships;But the upper air grew chilly and she shivered from my breast,With my token on her forehead, down towards the vale she prest.
God has set a moon this evening like a ghost between the trees,And the plain is white and splendid out towards the calling seas,And the light of Heaven's garden through its golden oriels flows;But my heart is valley-tethered to the whisper of a rose!