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The Passionate Woodlander to his Love
Come live with me and be my sweet And we will all the pleasures treat That life and love, green earth, deep night, Do offer for the heart's delight. Come live with me and we will own All that's free to all who roam The forest hills round blooming towns, Which springtime with wild roses crowns: A rowboat for a wedding car, For a diamond your favorite star, A pine-needle bed for a bower, And thunderstorms our bridal shower. Lost caves, and secret cemeteries, Stick caterpillars, sweet mulberries, Raspberry spiders, watchful does, Windshook towers, and cawing crows, Emerald beetles, black-backed snakes, Spooky sprucewoods, and distant lakes: These things and more each year we'll greet If you will come and be my sweet. Come go with me, I'll go with you Where butterflies of midnight-blue Disport with tiger swallowtails To tempt us down their weedy trails; Where frogs dive screaming into pools And start us so, we laugh like fools; Where turtles bob and disappear — Here all of life shines water clear —; Where river mud the herons mark In cuneiform texts that cryptic hark To us of silent ageless ages The wordless songs of nature's sages; Where daffodils still every year, Where once a garden grew, appear, Where once a lonely cabin stood, Where once a woman in this wood Once lived and laughed and passed from time, Beside a creek where we may find A pottery shard, a bead of glass — Mementos of a present past. Come love with me and we will live The whole of life that love does give As full to lovers as to these, The trees, the deer, the birds and bees: A-bloom, a-buzz, a-burst with life, And life with love: with you my wife All this is mine, mine all is yours, Our treasures all time brings our shores. |