The Happy Marriage and Other Poems/Years Ago
YEARS AGO
Why should I think of spring in France
When each new April's new mischance
Of gypsy magic and green change
Leaves earth familiarly strange?
Were there not springs before that spring?
Was there not whist and whispering
Of wind in willow until then?
And shall there not be springs again?
I can remember times more near
And longer past than that strange year;
Hip-booted springs, half faun, half boy,
Over the lakes in Illinois,
Following the swollen runnels down
To beaches where the waves broke brown
Shaking the air, and the landward breeze
Smelled of fresh water and far pine trees,
And overnight in the steep ravine
The first hepatica grew green;
And brief, too brief, New Haven Junes,
Green mornings, harbor-smelling noons,
And twilights flat on the shadowy turf
Washed with the footfalls' shallow surf,
With a drifting voice far off and sweet,
And the rumble of wheels on the Chapel Street,
Drowsing and talking whimsily
Of Noah's ark and a life at sea.
I can remember springs more near,
Yet never when the winter's clear
And there's an earthy smoke about
And sluggard black flies blunder out,
Never do I remember these,
But seeing tint the apple trees
I see the orchards north from Meaux
Haggard with dust where the wagons go,
And smelling plow lands under rain
I smell the soft French earth again
Cut deep beneath the clumsy guns,
And hearing how some whistler runs
His broken scale hear then the song
That sunny days and all day long
A dead boy used to sing and sing.
But there were songs before that spring.