By Wold and Wood by Madison Cawein — Read

/ I. Green, watery jets of light let through / The rippling foliage drenched with dew; / Bland glow-worm glamours warm and dim / Above the mystic vistas swim, / Where, 'round the fountain's oozy urn, / The limp, loose fronds of limber fern / Wave dusky tresses thin and wet, / Blue-filleted with violet. / O'er roots that writhe in snaky knots / The moss in amber cushions clots; / From wattled walls of brier and brush / The elder's misty attars gush; / And, Argus-eyed, by knoll and bank / The affluent wild rose flowers rank; / And stol'n in shadowy retreats, / In black, rich soil, your vision greets / The colder undergrowths of woods, / Damp, lushy-leaved, whose gloomier moods / Turn all the life beneath to death / And rottenness for their own breath.

/ May-apples waxen-stemmed and large / With their bloom-screening breadths of targe; / Wake robins dark-green leaved, their stems / Tipped with green, oval clumps of gems, / As if some woodland Bacchus there / A-braiding of his yellow hair / With ivy-tod had idly tost / His thyrsus there, and so had lost. / Low blood root with its pallid bloom, / The red life of its mother's womb / Through all its ardent pulses fine / Beating in scarlet veins of wine. / And where the knotty eyes of trees / Stare wide, like Fauns' at Dryades / That lave smooth limbs in founts of spar, / Shines many a wild-flower's tender star.