Ralph Waldo Emerson, comp. (1803–1882). Parnassus: An Anthology of Poetry. 1880.
Telling the BeesJohn Greenleaf Whittier (18071892)
H
Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
And the poplars tall;
And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,
And the white horns tossing above the wall.
And down by the brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,
Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.
Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
And the same brook sings of a year ago.
And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.
From my Sunday coat
I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.
To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.
Of light through the leaves,
The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,
The bloom of her roses under the eves.
The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,—
Nothing changed but the hive of bees.
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!
For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
The fret and the pain of his age away.”
With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
Sung to the bees stealing out and in.
In my ear sounds on:—
“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”