June Days / Charles Lotin Hildreth

June Days

Wane on, delicious days of shower and shine,
Cool, cloudy morns and noontides white and warm,
And eyes that melt in azure hyaline,
Wane to midsummer's long, lethean calm.

William Trost Richards
(1833-1905), June Day, 1915.
Wikimedia Commons.

For all the woods are shrill with stress of song,
Where soft wings flutter down to new-built nests,
And turbulent sweet sounds are heard day-long,
As of innumerable marriage feasts.

The flame of flowers is bright along the plain,
The hills are dim beneath pale, brooding skies;
And, like a kiss that thrills through every vein,
The warm wind, odor-laden, stirs and sighs,

Murmuring like music heard afar by night
From boats becalmed on star-illumined streams,
Sad as the memory of a lost delight,
Sweet as the voices that are heard in dreams.

Wane, siren days, and break the spell that wrings
The burdened breast with undefined regret,
Wayward desires, and vain imaginings,
The nameless longing, and the idle fret.

Wane on! ye wake the love that tempts and flies;
And where love is, thence peace departs full soon;
But, ah, how sweet love is, e'en though it dies
With thy last roses, O enchantress June !

~~
Charles Lotin Hildreth (1856-1896)
from The Masque of Death, and other poems, 1889

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]