An Easter Song / Richard Le Gallienne

An Easter Song

Arise, my heart, and sing thy Easter song!
     To the great anthem of returning bird,
     And sweetening bud, and green ascending blade,
          Add thou thy word.
Long was the winter and the waiting long;
     Heart, there were hours, indeed, thou wert afraid,
          So long the Spring delayed.

Shut in the Winter's alabaster tomb,
     So white and still the sleeping Summer lay
          That dead she seemed;
And none might know how in her magic side
     Slept the young Spring, and moved,
          And smiled, and dreamed.
Behold, she wakes again, and, open-eyed,
     Gazes, in wonder, 'round the leafy room,
At the young flowers. Upon this Easter Day
     Awaken, too, my heart, open thine eyes,
     And from thy seeming death thou, too, arise.

Arise, my heart; yea, go thou forth and sing!
     Join thou thy voice to all this music sweet
     Of crowding leaf and busy, building wing,
          And falling showers;
The murmur soft of little lives new-born,
     The armies of the grass, the million feet
          Of marching flowers.

How sweetly blows the Resurrection horn
     Across the meadows, over the far hills!
     In the soul's garden a new sweetness stirs,
         And the heart fills,
As in and out the mind flow the soft airs.
     Arise, my heart, and sing, this Easter morn;
     In the year's resurrection do thy part,
          Arise, my heart!

~~
Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947)
from New Poems, 1910

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

Richard Le Gallienne biography