Welcoming Lengtentima (Lententime/Spring) - 2016

‘Chloris’

By Paul Hamilton Hayne

Source:  Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne: Electronic Edition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/hayne/hayne.html, 1999, accessed 22 March 2016, pgs. 147-8.  © This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

WHAT time the rosy-flushing West
Sleeps soft on copse and dingle,
Wherein the sunset shadows rest,
Or richly float and mingle;

When down the vale the wood-dove's tone
Thrills in a cadence tender,
And every rare, ethereal mote
Turns to a wingèd splendor.

Just as the mystic cloudlands ope,
Far up their sapphire portal,
Fair as the fairest dream of Hope,
Half goddess and half mortal,

I see that lovely genius rise,
That child of Orient trances,
On whose sweet face the glory lies
Of weird Hellenic fancies,--

Chloris! beneath whose procreant tread
All earth yields up her sweetness,
The violet's scent, the rose's red,
The dahlia's orbed completeness,

And verdures on the myriad hills,
The breath of her pure duty
Hath nursed to life by sparkling rills
And foliaged nooks of beauty;

Till bloom and odor, blush and song,
So fill earth's radiant spaces,
The fading touch of sin, or wrong,
Leaves glad the weariest faces;

And so, through happy spring-tide dells,
O'er mount, and field, and river,
Her zephyr's fairy clarion swells,
Her footsteps glance forever!