Classic Poem

You know the kind of morning that it was
(There are three mornings I remember well —
This was the first): The east a thing of gauze
Where one by one the filmy curtains fell,
So delicately fell, the morning light
Came now from nowhere, only grew and grew —
A little more of day and less of night
Until the west and east were equal blue.

That was the morning we came driving home
After the weekly dance at Coopersville,
When first the grayness stole across the dome;
Remember it was three we danced until?
We did not hurry; up the woodland road
I let the old horse amble as he would;
For driving lovers seldom use the goad,
And life that morning was so very good.

There may be mortals who have never seen
A morning in the wilderness arise,
Or learned the hundred shades there are of green,
The hundred tints of azure in the skies.
They may know Nature, but they do not know
The inner secrets that she will disclose,
The thousand little beauties she will show,
When turn the walls of black to walls of rose.

To hear the matin twitter of a bird
Is sweeter music than his proudest lay;
Some mystery a distant branch has stirred,
Some woodland signal of returning day.
And now another sings a sleepy note,
Some little hidden singer answers him,
The low, hushed music of a waking throat,
Soft as the singing in cathedrals dim.

And you were very weary, I recall,
And I was very silent to your mood,
A little closer drew your little shawl,
And thought the thought a waking pigeon cooed.
Then on my shoulder fell a golden head,
That head you held so proudly other times;
The morning said the things I would have said,
And said them better than a poet's rimes.

That was our mating, mating without speech —
No pledge, no promise, no vehement vow;
The morning seemed into our hearts to reach;
We always after understood, somehow.
There are three mornings I remember well,
Three mornings that have been the best and worst,
When I have sipped of heaven, tasted hell —
There were three mornings — this one was the first.

A year; another morning; by a fire
I woke to feel a shiver in the breeze;
Above a pine sighed dismally, the sire
Of all the circle of his somber trees.
An Indian runner loping down the hill,
Red-visage, sullen, silent, swollen eyes,
Fit messenger to carry tale so ill —
There was no blue that morning in the skies.

You had grown weary of your wedded life,
The constant quarrel and the endless hurt,
The things I said that cut you like a knife,
The husband's heel that ground you in the dirt.
I might return, but you were through with me,
The two who had been one again were two.
I looked afar above the murmuring tree:
But in the sky that morning was no blue.

Then from the west there came a puff of rain,
Not rain that comes majestic in its might:
The slow, damp fog that hides the hill and plain,
A wall of gray to bar the morning light.
The fire burned sickly, heavy hung the smoke;
No bird attempted song in hour so sad;
Beneath its weight of wet a sapling broke,
And east and west no hope of morning had.

Forgetting rain, the rain I could not feel,
I sat me down upon the sodden ground
And read your letter like a knife of steel;
I turned your knife of steel around, around.
The runner took his dollar with no sign
And left me to my thoughts and dying fire,
My dying fire and dying hopes of mine,
When all things died except the old desire.

It was not many mornings after that,
That other morning. All the hours of night
The waters rose upon the marshy flat,
The maddened river, like a horse in flight
Rolled down upon the village by the mill,
Rolled down upon the little sawmill town;
And some there were took refuge on the hill,
And some there were could only pray and drown.

And then I found you, when upon the east
One trembling finger wrote a word of dawn
And then a sentence, till the torrent ceased,
The gray sky opened and the night was gone.
And this made such a morning glorious,
The most remembered in my memory,
That, while I sought you madly, madly thus,
I came upon you seeking after me.

That morn we watched the troubled waters fall;
The crest was over and the danger past.
That was the morning holiest of all,
For we had learned the truth of it at last.
Each wrong, each right, each foolish in a way,
We wrote " forgotten " on our ills of old,
And saw the sunrays of returning day
Change skies to blue, and life again to gold.

Upon the hill we built our house again,
The sure, high hill that floods could never touch,
And loved a little better ever then,
Who loved too little when we loved too much.
Upon the solid rock of faith we stand,
And, gray the cloud or sunny blue the skies,
We meet them heart to heart and hand in hand —
For all our mornings three have made us wise.