Early Poems (1859-70). The Waterfall
The song of the water Doomed ever to roam, A beautiful exile, Afar from its home. The cliffs on the mountain, The grand and the gray, They took the bright creature And hurled it away! I heard the wild downfall, And knew it must spill A passionate heart out All over the hill. Oh! was it a daughter Of sorrow and sin, That they threw it so madly Down into the lynn? ... And listen, my Sister, For this is the song The Waterfall taught me The ridges among:— "Oh where are the shadows So cool and so sweet And the rocks," saith the water, "With the moss on their feet? "Oh, where are my playmates The wind and the flowers— The golden and purple— Of honey-sweet bowers, "Mine eyes have been blinded Because of the sun; And moaning and moaning I listlessly run. "These hills are so flinty!— Ah! tell me, dark Earth, What valley leads back to The place of my birth?— "What valley leads up to The haunts where a child Of the caverns I sported, The free and the wild? "There lift me,"—it crieth, "I faint from the heat; With a sob for the shadows So cool and so sweet." Ye rocks, that look over With never a tear, I yearn for one half of The wasted love here! My sister so wistful, You know I believe, Like a child for the mountains This water doth grieve. Ah! you with the blue eyes And golden-brown hair, Come closer and closer And truly declare:— Supposing a darling Once happened to sin, In a passionate space, Would you carry her in— If your fathers and mothers, The grand and the gray, Had taken the weak one And hurled her away?
Henry Kendall’s other poems:
