Classic Poem

When ripened Summer dreams and sleeps,
And her hushed silence teems
With golden gleam of mystic drowse
And silvern trance of dreams;

And all the woods are held in moods
Of slumber sunbeam spun,
There is an elfin dancer, light,
Who dances in the sun.

And stands and claps his shining hands
And bids the mirth move on
Of some invisible, mystic rout
The slumbrous day upon.

And they, the revellers, dim, unseen,
Who chase his phantom mood;
Perchance the naiads of the stream,
The dryads of the wood.

For when a wind-breath wakes the world
And stirs each drowsed tree,
Like magic silver works his bow
In fiddlings merrily.

And all his elfin revellers dance
By glint of wood and stream,
Till all the drowsed day about
Goes dancing in his dream.

And when in shrouded moonlight glooms
The woodland sighs and frets,
Along the snowy dream he shakes
His silvern castanets.

Till phantom creatures of the night,
Shy satyrs, gnomes and fauns
Foot to his music mad and sweet
Along the mossy lawns.

He is the master of the mirth
Of field and stream and tree;
And of the dreamers of the wood,
The lord of revels, he.

Till Summer and her dream depart
And leaf and gleam be done,
He holds the whole world's laughing heart,
This dancer in the sun.