How Spring Came (to the Lake Region) / William Wilfred Campbell

How Spring Came (to the Lake Region)

No passionate cry came over the desolate places,
No answering call from iron-bound land to land;
But dawns and sunsets fell on mute, dead faces,
And noon and night death crept from strand to strand.

Till love breathed out across the wasted reaches,
And dipped in rosy dawns from desolate deeps;
And woke with mystic songs the sullen beaches,
And flamed to life the pale, mute, death-like sleeps.

Then the warm south, with amorous breath inblowing,
Breathed soft o’er breast of wrinkled lake and mere;
And faces white from scorn of the north’s snowing,
Now rosier grew to greet the kindling year.

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William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918)
from Lake Lyrics, and other poems, 1893

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

William Wilfred Campbell biography