Back River! What a name For yesterdays come back again today, Reborn to be tomorrows still the same — A landgrave built it when the English came;
Then men made houses well With cunning hands. And service wore a nearer, feudal guise — Witness the stone where “Rose,
A faithful servant,” lies. Parnassus stretches east, beyond that The plantation once called Ararat; But they have gone,
Forgotten as an ancient drinking song; And the old houses, dull and roofless, Gape, with their doorways Like a dumb mouth toothless,
With snake-engendering rooms that wall in fear, Silent, down forest roadways loved by deer. Sometimes at nights These skeletons of houses flash with lights,
And shadow-horsemen ride, Chasing wraith-deer With eery cry of hounds And shuddering cheer;
While the moon makes her rounds, Glimmering through windows dead As the dead eyes in a dead man's head; And there is heard a misty horn —
Down in the woods, Among the moss-draped solitudes, The voodoo rooster crows, While owls hoot on forlorn.
But Back River wears a different face; It has not changed;— Time seems to love the place; Though all about it he has ranged,
Here he has not Touched with his wand of rot — Something of its immortal live-oak sap suffuses Its sturdy men and houses and transfuses
Change into state. The sunny hours wait at strange behest. Here restless Time himself has come to rest. The golden ivory of primeval light
Dwells in its Spanish moss, Falling in living cascades from the trees, And who goes there in summer hears the bees Booming among the Pride of India trees,
Dull grumbling tones, A deaf man dreams, Like far-off rumbling sound of boulder-stones Washed down by headlong streams.
This is Time's temple; Here he sleepy lies, Watching the buzzards circle in the skies, While shrubs slough off the pod,
Making a carpet delicate Of petals strewn upon the sod, Fit for the silver slippers of the moon Upon the streets of Nod.
I saw him once asleep Down by the dark ponds Where alligators creep. He had been fishing with a willow withe,
And by him lay his hourglass and scythe, Resting upon the grass; They lay there in the sun, And through the glass the sands had ceased to run.
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