So, some tempestuous morn in early June, When the year’s primal burst of bloom is o’er, Before the roses and the longest day,-- When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor, With blossoms red and white of fallen May, And chestnut-flowers, are strewn,-- So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry, From the wet field, through the vexed garden-trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: _The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I_! Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell, And stocks in fragrant blow; Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the full moon, and the white evening-star. He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown! What matters it? next year he will return, And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days, With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern, And bluebells trembling by the forest-ways, And scent of hay new-mown. But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see,-- See him come back, and cut a smoother reed, And blow a strain the world at last shall heed; For Time, not Corydon, hath conquered thee! Alack, for Corydon no rival now!-- But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate, Some good survivor with his flute would go, Piping a ditty sad for Bion’s fate; And cross the unpermitted ferry’s flow, And relax Pluto’s brow, And make leap up with joy the beauteous head Of Proserpine, among whose crownèd hair Are flowers first opened on Sicilian air, And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead. Oh, easy access to the hearer’s grace When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, She knew the Dorian water’s gush divine, She knew each lily white which Enna yields, Each rose with blushing face; She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain. But ah! of our poor Thames she never heard; Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred; And we should tease her with our plaint in vain. Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be; Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour In the old haunt, and find our tree-topped hill! Who, if not I, for questing here hath power? I know the wood which hides the daffodil; I know the Fyfield tree; I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river-fields, Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields; And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries;