Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Complete Poetical Works. 1893.

Birds of Passage

Flight the First. Birds of Passage

This poem, originally published in The Seaside and the Fireside, afforded the poet a convenient title under which to group successively poems contributed to various periodicals, especially Putnam’s Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly; it has therefore been made the introductory poem. The several Flights were printed as the miscellaneous poems in volumes containing longer works. The first was contained in the volume which held The Courtship of Miles Standish.

BLACK shadows fall

From the lindens tall,

That lift aloft their massive wall

Against the southern sky;

And from the realms

Of the shadowy elms

A tide-like darkness overwhelms

The fields that round us lie.

But the night is fair,

And everywhere

A warm, soft vapor fills the air,

And distant sounds seem near;

And above, in the light

Of the star-lit night,

Swift birds of passage wing their flight

Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat

Of their pinions fleet,

As from the land of snow and sleet

They seek a southern lea.

I hear the cry

Of their voices high

Falling dreamily through the sky,

But their forms I cannot see.

Oh, say not so!

Those sounds that flow

In murmurs of delight and woe

Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs

Of the poet’s songs,

Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

The sound of wingèd words.

This is the cry

Of souls, that high

On toiling, beating pinions, fly,

Seeking a warmer clime.

From their distant flight

Through realms of light

It falls into our world of night,

With the murmuring sound of rhyme.