Explore "The Forest Spring" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Push back the brambles, berry-blue: / The hollowed spring is full in view: / Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern / Its rock-embedded, crystal urn.
/ Not for the loneliness that keeps / The coigne wherein its silence sleeps; / Not for wild butterflies that sway / Their pansy pinions all the day / Above its mirror; nor the bee, / Nor dragonfly, that passing see / Themselves reflected in its spar; / Not for the one white liquid star, / That twinkles in its firmament; / Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent / Athwart it when the kindly night / Beads all its grasses with the light / Small jewels of the dimpled dew; / Not for the day's inverted blue / Nor the quaint, dimly coloured stones / That dance within it where it moans: / Not for all these I love to sit / In silence and to gaze in it. / But, know, a nymph with merry eyes / Looks at me from its laughing skies; / A graceful glimmering nymph who plays / All the long fragrant summer days / With instant sights of bees and birds, / And speaks with them in water words, / And for whose nakedness the air / Weaves moony mists, and on whose hair, / Unfilleted, the night will set / That lone star as a coronet.