Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, ed. The Book of New York Verse. 1917.

Morning in Central Park

James Oppenheim

WHEN the morning sun

Spills his red lights among the naked trees

And one by one

The hills awaken—and like wind-played seas

Give back the music of the breeze,

When among film and tracery of boughs

Stripped by the winter’s teeth,

Green glow the sun-filled pines—O man, unhouse

Your head of human walls—get from beneath

Shut ceilings—let the skies take off the roof

Of your small room—and into the Park at seven

Go with tremendous stride—

Earth there is open wide

To the sun and the wind and the amplitude of heaven!

That Child, the World, from out the infinite night

Draws through the dark

Into the light—

And all the sacred mystery of Birth

Hovers on the Earth—

Even in the pale of the man-gardened Park

The mystery of Morn, the beauty and the splendor

Through the groves are slipping, from the boughs are dripping,

A miracle without us,

That yet the heart’s core owns!—

Chant there the pebble-tripped waters shut in stones,

Sparrows are over the turf chirping and tripping,

And Man’s World sings in a swinging circle about us!

O film of ice skimming the crystal pool!

See how it flashes in the wintry sun!

And hear the water splash!—how clean! how cool!

And behold how visible, yea, on every one,

The silences of enormous centuries,

Brood on the rocks and the unstirring trees!