Explore "After Rain" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Behold the blossom-bosomed Day again, / With all the star-white Hours in her train, / Laughs out of pearl-lights through a golden ray, / That, leaning on the woodland wildness, blends / A sprinkled amber with the showers that lay / Their oblong emeralds on the leafy ends. / Behold her bend with maiden-braided brows / Above the wildflower, sidewise with its strain / Of dewy happiness, to kiss again / Each drop to death; or, under rainy boughs, / With fingers, fragrant as the woodland rain, / Gather the sparkles from the sycamore, / To set within each core / Of crimson roses girdling her hips, / Where each bud dreams and drips. / Smoothing her blue-black hair, -- where many a tusk / Of iris flashes, -- like the falchions' sheen / Of Faery 'round blue banners of its Queen, -- / Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk, / That haunts the spring, where all the moss is musk / With footsteps of the flowers on the banks? / Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks?
/ Balm for each blade of grass: the Hours prepare / A festival each weed's invited to. / Each bee is drunken with the honied air: / And all the air is eloquent with blue. / The wet hay glitters, and the harvester / Tinkles his scythe, -- as twinkling as the dew, -- / That shall not spare / Blossom or brier in its sweeping path; / And, ere it cut one swath, / Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare.