Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space, Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words In the music-haunted houses of the birds, Singers with the thrushes and pewees In the glimmer-lighted roofs Of the trees-- Unhand my soul! Buds with singing in their hearts, Birds with blooms upon their wings, All the wandering whispers of delight, The near familiar things; Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies, Sounds of going in the grain Shall not bind me to thy singing When the sky with God is ringing For the Joy of the Rain. Sea and star and hill and thunder, Dawn and sunset, noon and night, All the vast processional of the wonder Where the worlds are, Where my soul is, Where the shining tracks are For the spirit's flight-- Lift thine eyes to these From the haunts of dewdrops, Hollows of the flowers, Caves of bees That sing like thee, Only in their bowers; From the stately growing cities Of the little blowing leaves, To the infinite windless eaves Of the stars; From the dainty music of the ground, The dim innumerable sound Of the Mighty Sun Creeping in the grass, Softest stir of His feet (Where they go Far and slow On their immemorial beat Of buds and seeds And all the gentle and holy needs Of flowers), To the old eternal round Of the Going of His Might, Above the confines of the dark, Odors and winds and showers, Day and night, Above the dream of death and birth Flickering East and West, Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth-- Where He wheels And soars And plays In illimitable light, Sends the singing stars upon their ways And on each and every world When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep Is furled-- Pours the Days. * * * * * The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric cars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home to supper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The Thing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been found by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turned on--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels, and run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out in the darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I had seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked on in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more surprised if I had met a star walking in the street. In my deepest dream I heard the Song Running in my sleep Through the lowest caves of Being Down below Where no sound is, sun is, Hearing, seeing That men know. There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars moving, that made it all seem very old. _An Ode to the Lightning._