Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river-sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. ODE TO PSYCHE O GODDESS! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that my secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear: Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awakened eyes? I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly, And on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures couched side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet scarce espied: ’Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass, Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: The winged boy I knew; But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? His Psyche true! O latest-born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-regioned star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky: Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heaped with flowers; Nor Virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming. O brightest! though too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retired From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see and sing, by my own eyes inspired. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours! Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.