The Playmate

The Playmate

The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,

Their song was soft and low;

The blossoms, in the sweet May wind,

Were falling like the snow.

The blossoms drifted at our feet,

The orchard birds sand clear;

The sweetest and the saddest day

It seemed of all the year.

For, more to me than birds or flowers,

My playmate left her home,

And took with her the laughing spring,

The music, and the bloom.

She kissed the lips of kith and kin,

She laid her hands in mine;

What more could ask the bashful boy

Who fed her father's kine?

She left us in the bloom of May:

The constant years told o'er

Their seasons with as sweet May morns,

But she came back no more.

I walked, with noiseless feet, the round

Of uneventful years;

Still o'er and o'er I sow the spring,

And reap the autumn ears.

She lives where all the golden year

Her summer roses blow;

The dusky children of the sun

Before her come and go.

There, haply, with her jeweled hands,

She smooths her silken gown—

No more the homespun lap wherein

I shook the walnuts down.

The wild grapes wait us by the brook,

The brown nuts on the hill,

And still the May-day flowers make sweet

The woods of Follymill.

The lillies blossom in the pond,

The bird builds in the tree,

The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill

The slow song of the sea.

I wonder if she thinks of them,

And how the old time seems—

If ever the pines of Ramoth wood

Are sounding in her dreams.

I see her face, I hear her voice:

Does she remember mine?

And what to her is now the boy

Who fed her father's kine?

What cares she that the orioles build

For other eyes than ours—

That other hands with nuts are filled,

And other laps with flowers?

O playmate in the golden time!

Our mossy seat is green;

Its fringing violets bloom yet,

The old trees o'er it lean!

The winds so sweet with birch and fern

A sweeter memory blow,

And there in spring the veeries sing

The song of long ago.

And still the pines of Ramoth wood

Are moaning like the sea—

The moaning of the sea of change

Between myself and thee!

John G. Whittier (John Greenleaf Whittier)

1:44, p. 4

5.19.1860