Classic Poem

I

Out of the chaos of sunset, the one white star and the silence,
Far in the fiery dusk, off at the ends of the world,
Out of the lavender twilight of misty October horizons,
Bursts, like a birth in the skies, swarming the legion of crows;
Onward and over the valley, and strangely perturbed in their winging
Bigger and blacker they stream, cawing in answer to caw.
So have I noted in April the wild-geese honking to northward.
Only in loftier air, up in the blue and the day ...
Morning and night and the seasons, and ever the ancient migrations,
While, for his hour, a man ... stands on a hill as they pass.

II

News, like the caw of the crow or the cry of the Canada flyers,
Startled me walking at noon, naming me one who had died —
Flashed by the desolate wires that yonder, threading the tree-tops
Pole unto pole on the moor, under the flight of the crows,
Still are to see, on a silvery strip of the nethermost heavens,
Cutting the splotches of red, crossing from darkness to dark ...
News of the earth and the ages, and spelt by the spirit of lightning:
Bolt from the cloud or the wire — each is an omen to man.

III

Here by the mound of the Eagle, obscure in the yellowing grasses,
Under an oak that is gone, leaving the acorn for ours,
Once, ere the Saxon invader re-named the ravines and the ranges,
Bronze hands kindled a blaze, cheery and pungent as mine, —
Pausing I fancy as I, while followed the last of the fledglings
Bat-like hither and yon — suddenly swifter away. . . .
Night and the seasons and cycles, and ever the ancient migrations,
While, for its hour, a fire ... burns on a hill as they pass.

IV

And as the haze and the gloaming have blotted the roads and the landmarks,
Yonder and yonder the plain ... spreads like an alien world,
Quiet, primeval and vast, as in autumns after the ice-age,
When, from the journeying seeds, blown by the South in the spring
(Blown to the edge of the desert, the hollows of silt and the drumlins,
Borne in the toes of a tern, cast in the dung of a deer),
Summer by summer the junipers, sumachs, birches, and berries
Gained on the leagues to the north, bleak with Arcturus and cold ...
Season and cycle and aeon, and ever the ancient migrations,
Whether a man and his fire ... linger or not on the hill.