Classic Poem

O sing or tell a story. What shall I tell?
There was a Princess woke at early dawn,
A Princess in a castle, in the north,
And saw the forests rising tree on tree
Out of her little window, and ran forth
To look for berries in the autumn woods.
O sing of what she found in the woods as well.

She must slip away before the kitchen stirs,
With hooded golden hair, down garden walks,
Past home-faced apples, over the open ground
Where feed her father's herd of cream-white cows,
With swinging tails and delicate, peaceful feet
Among the mountain crocuses, with bells
Like hope and dew, and come to the edge of the woods.
Brave she must be, for in the woods are bears;
The noise of waters fills them like a breath
And footsteps make no sound. At home they tell
The king of the bears is an enchanted Prince
Who waits release. But who shall break the spell?

The forests rise around her tree on tree,
To cloud-high crags; they rise round secret lawns
Where red ash-berries for no human hand
Drop. And she listens. If she listens long
She hears clear voices, voices of surprise,
Wonder and argument and prophecies,
Hid in the streams. For whom to understand?
She only feels a spirit, that is hers,
Tells her to climb, to climb and fear no ills,
To fear no presence in the unpeopled woods,
Or hidden in the caverns of the hills.
She can but tell how swiftly she must start
Up, up the paths where only hunters go,
Running with silver shoes that make no mark,
Quick with a purpose that she cannot know
And singing unawares.

Wet bilberries and scarlet cranberries
Four-leaved Herb Paris with his sorcerer's heart,
Whose home is in the stillness under trees,
And black strange cherries, strange with double stones—
O all of these,
Tell how she plucked them with her weaving hands
To make a wreath of berries bright and dark,
And some that shone like blood in the early sun,
To make a wreath, a wreath for whom begun?
To make a garland for the king of the bears.
And then, O tell
How all at once her singing voice was dumb
And her heart fell.
Fierce-eyed and hairy round a jutting rock
Dark, dark and softly-footing he was there,
The king of the woods, the black enchanted bear,
Unpassably, unconquerably come.
But quickly, now tell this:
How she was brave, how she was not afraid,
She flung the wreath of berries round his neck,
The ripple of her amber-yellow hair
Sweeping his claws and pouring from her hood,
Her young thin arms, her oval cheek in fur,
And made him captive, captive with a kiss.

And suddenly, suddenly, there
Slant-eyed and smiling in the leaf-strewn light,
Silent as moss, and all the streams his speech,
A Prince was standing in the bilberry wood,
Proud and delivered in the world of men.
Right through the trees the sun ascending burned
In wealth of swaying gold his glorious way,
And wrapped in light and shadow each to each
No spoken word need say,
For in the arisen morning there he stands,
Free from his cavern's airless echoing space,
Safe from the dark compulsion of his form.

Sing how he looked at her with eyes returned
From exile to the harbour of her face,
To certainty from storm;
And touched her shoulders with his stranger's hands,
With hands grown more familiar in an hour
Than all her home and years of yesterday,
The unilluminated years before.
O sing and tell of this, and tell no more,
But how, as on the first created day
All things were new,
And through the tall-stemmed forest, far below,
Before they turned in harmony to go,
The clustered berries round their shoulders wound,
Before they reached the fruitful open ground
They heard the bells of feeding flocks, the sound
Like hope and dew.