Classic Poem

This is the time of the year's new birth when leaves and grasses,
Blooms sweet-colored, and winds mild-winged, return in their freshness.
Winter is dead, and all the time of ruin and wailing.
Sweetly smiling, and promising purple-delights in the summer,
Joy sets her foot on the earth, and, in answer to her enchantment,
Light comes back to the world in a sunrise warm and golden.
Who refrains from rejoicing, or who remains in bondage
Winter, with mistily-falling snows and ice like iron,
Pitiless forged for us, soul and body? Weary longings
Troubled our hearts for the coming of spring, and life, and the sunlight.
Lo! like a sea miraculous, flooding the land as with laughter,
Comes the dominion of flower, and leaf, and low-bowing grasses.
Surely again returns the dominion of smiles and rejoicings;
Surely back to their fastnesses in the sad spaces of sorrow,
Doubt, and fear, and weeping will flee like snows in the sunshine.
O my heart, will not youth and the bliss of its marvellous visions,
Cloud-shapes fantastic, woven in hours of hope, and unshadowed
Trustfulness, filling with glory as of suns supernatural the deep sky
Doming the ancient half-forgotten dreamings—O my heart, say,
Will they return and reclothe and relume, as with lustre of blossoms,
All the bleak spaces which sorrow and years, like ice-girdled winter,
Made in the spirit? Speak, O my heart, canst make responses
Stilling the clamors that din in thine ears, and noises of weeping,
Half-suppressed as for shame and the courage of desperation?
Seems it all in vain? Nay, useless are dreams and questioning.
Never returns the past, nor the things having been which are not;
Never returns the power which turned, like a wand Mercurial,
Sorceries of pain into weird and mystical enchantments of pleasure;
Nor the touch, like that fabled of old in the fingers of Midas,
Potent to spiritualize to golden and lovely resplendence
All the dull shows of the life we spend our breath in the living.
Take thou the day and the hour; what though the sun is hidden,
What though the clouds are weaving their gray and gloomy engirdment
For the pale welkin, what though the air is solemn and heavy,
Life, and time, and labor remain thee, and, in the spring-time,
Swift memorial gleams of the sweet-voiced times which return not,
Clouds in flocks o'ertravelling the deep blue concave, blossoms,
Birds, and winds, in whose hearts reposes the measureless sunshine.