Flight the First. Birds of Passage. Birds of Passage. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1893. Complete Poetical Works

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Complete Poetical Works. 1893.

Birds of Passage

Flight the First.
Birds of Passage

	… come i gru van cantando lor lai,
	Facendo in aer di sè lunga riga.
	DANTE.

This poem, originally published in The Seaside and the Fireside, afforded the poet a convenient title under which to group successively poems contributed to various periodicals, especially Putnam’s Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly; it has therefore been made the introductory poem. The several Flights were printed as the miscellaneous poems in volumes containing longer works. The first was contained in the volume which held The Courtship of Miles Standish.

BLACK shadows fall
From the lindens tall,
That lift aloft their massive wall
Against the southern sky;

And from the realms	5
Of the shadowy elms
A tide-like darkness overwhelms
The fields that round us lie.

But the night is fair,
And everywhere	10
A warm, soft vapor fills the air,
And distant sounds seem near;

And above, in the light
Of the star-lit night,
Swift birds of passage wing their flight	15
Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat
Of their pinions fleet,
As from the land of snow and sleet
They seek a southern lea.	20

I hear the cry
Of their voices high
Falling dreamily through the sky,
But their forms I cannot see.

Oh, say not so!	25
Those sounds that flow
In murmurs of delight and woe
Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs
Of the poet’s songs,	30
Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,
The sound of wingèd words.

This is the cry
Of souls, that high
On toiling, beating pinions, fly,	35
Seeking a warmer clime.

From their distant flight
Through realms of light
It falls into our world of night,
With the murmuring sound of rhyme.	40

CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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