The Whip-poor-will - A Poem from 1879

When apple-branches, flushed with bloom,

Load June's warm evenings with perfume,

And balmier grows each perfect day,

And fields are sweet with new-mown hay,

Then, minstrel loud, I hear thy note,

Up from the pasture thickets float —

Whip-poor-will!

 

Thine are the hours to love endeared

And summoned by thy accents weird,

What wild regrets — what tender pain,

Recalls my youthful dreams again,

As trailing down the shadowy years,

That old refrain loved memory hears —

Whip-poor-will!

 

The garish day inspires thee not;

But hid in some deep-shaded grot,

Thee, like a sad recluse, dost wait

The silver hours inviolate,

When every harsher sound is flown,

And groves and glens are thine alone,

Whip-poor-will!

 

Thou, when the rapt voluptuous night

Pants in the young moon's tender night,

And woods, and cliffs, and shimmering streams

Are splendid in her argent beams —

How thrills the lover's heart to hear

Thy loud staccato, liquid clear,

Whip-poor-will!

 

Whence comes thy iterated phrase;

That to the wondering ear conveys

Half-human sounds, yet cheats the sense

With vagueness of intelligence,

And, like a wandering voice of air

Haunts the dim fields, we know not where,

Whip-poor-will!

Henry M. Cornwell. August 21, 1879. Georgetown Times and Courier 14(23): 2. From: July, 1879; Scribner's Monthly 18(3): 416.