The Old Water Mill by Madison Cawein — Read

Wild ridge on ridge the wooded hills arise, / Between whose breezy vistas gulfs of skies / Pilot great clouds like towering argosies, / And hawk and buzzard breast the azure breeze. / With many a foaming fall and glimmering reach / Of placid murmur, under elm and beech, / The creek goes twinkling through long glows and glooms / Of woodland quiet, poppied with perfumes: / The creek, in whose clear shallows minnow-schools / Glitter or dart; and by whose deeper pools / The blue kingfishers and the herons haunt; / That, often startled from the freckled flaunt / Of blackberry-lilies -- where they feed and hide -- / Trail a lank flight along the forestside / With eery clangor. Here a sycamore, / Smooth, wave-uprooted, builds from shore to shore / A headlong bridge; and there, a storm-hurled oak / Lays a long dam, where sand and gravel choke / The water's lazy way. Here mistflower blurs / Its bit of heaven; there the oxeye stirs / Its gloaming hues of bronze and gold; and here.

A gray cool stain, like dawn's own atmosphere, / The dim wild-carrot lifts its crumpled crest: / And over all, at slender flight or rest, / The dragon-flies, like coruscating rays / Of lapis-lazuli and chrysoprase, / Drowsily sparkle through the summer days; / And, dewlap-deep, here from the noontide heat / The bell-hung cattle find a cool retreat: / And through the willows girdling the hill, / Now far, now near, borne as the soft winds will, / Comes the low rushing of the water-mill. / Ah, lovely to me from a little child, / How changed the place! wherein once, undefiled, / The glad communion of the sky and stream / Went with me like a presence and a dream.