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OUT OF SINGING DAYS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Break out in fire, my hill, at autumn's calling
Last Line: To be held dumb, when the soul breaks for a cry.
Subject(s): Autumn; Poetry & Poets; Seasons; Singing & Singers; Sound; Fall


I

Break out in fire, my hill, at autumn's calling;
Badge the blue sky with ecstasies of flame.
The leaves are falling, as the days are falling,
And you are neither apt to die, nor tame
To take the waning sunlight and the chill
In meek abandonment of lowly brown.
Mint gold and red gold in the sky, until
Your haughty banners swirl superbly down.
Your grass has burnt to purple, and your low
Persistent shrubs lift bleeding hearts in air;
Fillets of fire cling to your trees, and glow
In conquering agony; and everywhere
A gross red laugh indifferent to death,
Echoing the hot plea that burns my breath.

II

Cue me, O voices whispering at my ear,
In reach, but out of grasp: voices of stone
Unsung since men shaped them for arrow and spear,
Unsung since first they cooled as the earth's bones;
Voices of scentless flowers; voices of grass
And vine and tongueless sky aspiring tree;
Of beasts that stumble, and great wings that pass
Silently deathward, but for song from me.
Cue me, men wrenched by bitter useless pang.
And no less men made wordless by white bliss;
And O you vaster truths and powers, that clang
Your shields softly beside me, grant me this:
To read your silence, and to choral still
Your slow-unveiling, all-directing will.

III

What is a poet but a tiny flaw
Within the massive silent wall of things?
A trickle of thin beauty, misty law,
Escaped from their majestic prisonings?
Harmonies heaven-swelling, wherein we dwell,
Can only seep, a lessening, broken stream,
As dim as ocean-echoes in a shell,
As faint as an almost forgotten dream.
We are dumb enough, God knows; but life is dumber,
Only the rare dull echo of sweet noise,
A desert of winter, with an hour of summer,
A desert of pain, with a far cloud of joys
Mocking our bitter thirst. Then sing, faint breath,
Though nothing heed you but the ears of death.

IV

Sounds sing about me, like a great and glorious
Cloud of swift swallows; like a shower of leaves
Loosed in a tempest; ribald and uproarious
Snatches of catches; a dull tone that grieves
In the wrung heart; sounds like the hot stars chanting;
And the low dust tittering scorn at a tread;
The agony of wrenched creation panting,
The deep and sombre music of the dead.
Sounds sing about me -- fugitive and mocking;
And when I pen them in these scrawls of black,
They leap away, with laughter black and shocking,
And I can find no voice to call them back.
And I have found now what it means to die --
To be held dumb, when the soul breaks for a cry.





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