Poems (Storrie)/The Country Calls Me
The Country Calls Me.
The country calls me, Not the town, Where all day long The people throng And myriad feet Impatient beat An endless pattern on the street. They come, they go, How can one know From whence or why They hurry by? They go, they come, And still the hum Assaults mine ear. I hear, I hear Half-strangled notes From human throats, God help them! What is it they say? And 'mid the roar I hear the sore Sore weeping of down-trodden lives, And worse, ah worse! I feel the curse Of vice, exultant as it thrives, And how am I To crush it—I, Whose instinct is to turn and fly?
Alas! the town, As up and down It passes, hurrying to its goal, Is treading, treading, treading on my soul. The country calls me, But the town, the town appals me. The country calls me. I hear her calling From far, from far, Across the blue of the rolling plain Where the heat-haze shimmers like golden rain, In silver tones from the hidden creek Where a bell-bird is dipping his eager beak, And in whispers, soft as kisses, From the gorge where the pine grow? straight and tall And the fearless fronds of fern-trees fall O'er the lips of precipices, From the wide, sweet breath of her dusky dells Where a curlew ringeth her nightly knells, From out of her great, sad, brooding heart Where never man hath lot or part, From the wind, from the cloud, from the leafless tree, From the desert sands where no footprints be, Prom her solitude and her mystery The country calls me.