Menella Bute Smedley (Менелла Бьют Смедли)

The Lady and the Rooks

Trust the grand and gentle trees,
Never will their welcome fade;
All that lives may lie at ease
In the haven of their shade;
Treasuries of tranquil air
Keep they for the burning days;
And their boughs ascend like prayer,
And their leaves break forth like praise.

Patient are they, for they wait
On the humours of the year;
Noble, for they keep their state
When the winter leaves them sere;
Brave to suffer heat and cold,
And the tempest's war-alarms;
Very tender, for they hold
All bird-babies in their arms.
Where the winter silence hears
No voice louder than a brook's,
There was built for many years
A great city of the rooks;
There they brush the tall elm-crests
With their sable waft of wing;
You may count a hundred nests,
Bare among the buds of spring.

Couch'd in crimson window-curve,
Looks a lady to the sky,
Sees each builder swoop and swerve,
Like a great black butterfly;
Hum of their familiar talk,
Brings a greeting to her ear,
We are in the elm-tree walk!
Spring is sure, and summer near!
But a louder note invades,
Whence and how? who dares to tell?
They are building in the shades,
By her own pet oriel!
In her cedar, which so long
With a separate glory stood,
Like a Sunday-tree among
Work-day brethren of the wood.

In her cedar—nothing less!
Heavens, what free-and-easy birds!
Now she utters her distress,
Loudly, with despotic words:—
“This is quite against the laws,
You must drive them out of reach;
We shall have superfluous caws
Mixing with our parts of speech.”
So she spake, and it was done;
Strew the ruins at her feet!
Little homestead, scarce begun,
You shall never be complete.
See how silent and dismay'd
Hang the guilty pair aloof;
Tenants they, with rent unpaid,
Watching their dismantled roof.

And the fair spring-day was lost
In a soft prophetic night,
Covering all the coming host
Of King Summer's bloom and light;
And the household lay at rest,
Dreaming not of labour vain;
And the rooks to that poor nest
Came and set to work again.
Angry eyes awoke and saw,
Ruthless hands the work undo;
Many a faint remonstrant caw
Dies unheeded in the dew.
Five times was the nest begun;
Five times, with the dawn of day,
Were the cunning links undone,
And the framers chased away.

But one night, through all the trees,
Went a whirr of wings afloat,
And a tumult and a breeze,
Big with caws from many a throat;
Sleep is hunted from the house;
Through the dark the master looks,
Saying to his weary spouse,
“There's a strike among the rooks.”
To that houseless pair forlorn
All the nation came in aid:
“This,” they cried, “cannot be borne;
“In a night it shall be made!”
And it was! They pile, they weave,
Flit, fuss, chatter through the shade;
The first twig was set at eve,
And by dawn the eggs were laid.

When the lady came to see,
Much she marvell'd, as she might,
Such a goodly work to be
Finish'd in a single night.
All the air was black with wings,
For the nation hover'd near;
Pleading for their precious things,
Half in anger, half in fear.

1. Copernicus
2. Windy and Grey Morning
3. Once
4. Granmamma and the Fairies
5. The Lay of King James I in his Captivity

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