Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
Prairie Summer
By Amanda Theodocia Jones (18351914)B
Loomed up a black and massy cloud;
Fell down the volumed floods that flow
With volleying thunders near and loud,
With lightnings broad and blinding.
A week of flying lights and darks,
Then all was clear; from copse and corn
Flew grosbeaks, red-birds, whistling larks,
And thrushes voiced like peris lorn,
Themselves of Heaven reminding.
Where, under fairy-tasselled rues,
Low vines their scarlet fruits had borne,
That neither men nor gods refuse,—
Delicious, spicy, sating.
As there through meadow red-tops sere
I toiled, my fragile friends to greet,
Out sang the birds: “Good cheer! good cheer!”—
“This way!”—“Pure purity!”—“So sweet!”—
“See! see! a-waiting—waiting!”
The wild-flower wilderness between,
Therein the sun-emblazoning sheet,
Four ways the thickets darkly green,
The vaporous drifts and dazzles;
Swift lace-wings flittering high and low,
Sheen, gauzy scarves a-sag with dew,
Blown phloxes flaked like falling snow,
Wide spiderworts in umbels blue,
Wild bergamots and basils;
With ocherous pigments of the sun!
Translucent flowers of marvellous hue,
Red, amber, orange, all in one,—
Their brown-black anthers bursting
To scatter out their powdered gold:
One half with upward looks attent,
As holy secrets might be told,
One half with turbans earthward bent,
For Eden’s rivers thirsting.
As loath to trouble Summer calms;
The air was dense with sifted scent,
Dispersed from fervid mints and balms
Whose pungent fumes betrayed them.
The brooks, on yielding sedges flung,
Half-slept—babe-soft their pulses beat;
Wee humming-birds, green-burnished, swung
Now here, now there, to find the sweet,
As if a billow swayed them.
Went honey-mad; the dipters small
Caught wings, they bathed in airy heat;
I saw the mottled minnows all,—
So had the pool diminished.
No Sybarite ever banqueted
As those bird-rioters young and old:
The red-wing’s story, while he fed,
A thousand times he partly told,
But never fairly finished.
Broke off his black and gold to trim;
Quarrelled the blue-jay fiery-bold,—
Or feast or fight all one to him,
True knight at drink or duel;
New wine of berries black and red
The noisy cat-bird sipped and sipped;
The king-bird bragged of battles dread,
How he the stealthy hawk had whipped—
That armed marauder cruel.
Slow feathered seeds began to sail;
Gray milk-weed pods their flosses slipped,—
More blithely blew the buoying gale,
And sent them whitely flying.
Rose up new creatures every hour
From brittle-walled chrysalides;
The yellow wings on every flower
With ringèd wasps and bumble-bees
Shone, Danae’s gold outvying.