Echo

How see you Echo? When she calls I see
Her pale face looking down through some great tree,
Whose world of green is like a moving sea,
That shels re-echo.
I see her with a white face like a mask,
That vanishes to come again; damask
Her cheek, but deeply pale,
Her eyes are green,
With a silver sheen,
And she mocks the thing you ask.
"O Echo!" (hear the children calling) "are you there"...
"Where?"...

When the wind blows over the hill,
She hids with a vagrant will,
And call you may loud, and call you may long,
She lays a finger on lip when the winds are strong,
And for all your pains she is still.
But when young plants spring, and the chiff-chaffs sing,
And the scarlet capped woodpecker flies through the vale,
She is out all day
Through fragrant May,
To babble and tattle her Yea and Nay.
"O Echo!" (still the children call) "Where are you? Where?"
"Air..."





~Viscountess Grey