The Song the Oriole Sings

  There is a bird that comes and sings
    In the Professor's garden-trees;
  Upon the English oak he swings,
    And tilts and tosses in the breeze.

  I know his name, I know his note,
    That so with rapture takes my soul;
  Like flame the gold beneath his throat,
    His glossy cope is black as coal.

  O oriole, it is the song
    You sang me from the cottonwood,
  Too young to feel that I was young,
    Too glad to guess if life were good.

  And while I hark, before my door,
    Adown the dusty Concord Road,
  The blue Miami flows once more
    As by the cottonwood it flowed.

  And on the bank that rises steep,
    And pours a thousand tiny rills,
  From death and absence laugh and leap
    My school-mates to their flutter-mills.

  The blackbirds jangle in the tops
    Of hoary-antlered sycamores;
  The timorous killdee starts and stops
    Among the drift-wood on the shores.

  Below, the bridge--a noonday fear
    Of dust and shadow shot with sun--
  Stretches its gloom from pier to pier,
    Far unto alien coasts unknown.

  And on those alien coasts, above,
    Where silver ripples break the stream's
  Long blue, from some roof-sheltering grove
    A hidden parrot scolds and screams.

  Ah, nothing, nothing! Commonest things:
    A touch, a glimpse, a sound, a breath--
  It is a song the oriole sings--
    And all the rest belongs to death.

  But oriole, my oriole,
    Were some bright seraph sent from bliss
  With songs of heaven to win my soul
    From simple memories such as this,

  What could he tell to tempt my ear
    From you? What high thing could there be,
  So tenderly and sweetly dear
    As my lost boyhood is to me?