Landscape from a Window: Hudson River School

Lady, these pleasures in your eyes,

The lilac hedges and the terraced lawn,

Are the works of man.

The bleeding-heart, the blowzy peony

Are glimpses of the cheerful gardener's art;

These are the tamed, almost abnormal sights of nature:

The wax-white water lily is like a teacup floating on a mirror,

The snake, the lizard, the mountain cat, the beaver

Have been warned to keep away.

(It has been said that some were shot,

But this is no great matter.)

And look! there is a permanently cast-iron, whitewashed deer

Stalking the lower garden, pretty to look at,

And more impervious to mischance

Than his swifter, less blind, and not much more

Intelligent fellows-and perhaps more artful,

For a child has painted a red house

And a purple-eyed sunflower on his right saddle,

And on his left, someone has written

"Amy loves Richard, 1934."

This, then, is peace,

The holograph for a philosopher to read

On a sub-suburban summer holiday,

But he had better not eat the wild crab apples

That have fallen to the ground.

Lady, the air has an almost funereal quiet.

And is the shaded lawn, the downcast, whispering willow

The usual state of nature and of man?

It is so restful that the aging idiot

Who sits benignly on his chair forgets the day

He set the church on fire

And fed his neighbor's chickens ratsbane and cyanide;

His jungles fade in tree-tops,

and an empty road

Admits a soldier in full battle-dress;

Dust-caked and sad he commands an open gate.

His voice trembles and even his hands are gray:

"Is it ten more miles to camp? I have lost my way."