1

THYME.

Wistaria in a robe of gold
Whispers to every passing air;
Large leaves are hanging brown and cold
About the fig-tree stript and bare.
Though skies have hodden
1
grey to wear,
A summer fragrance comes to me;
I breathe above the years despair
The thyme that scented Arcady.

Grey-green amid the withered weeds,
Ere wake the earliest daffodils,
It holds the piping of the reeds
Old shepherds blew on Grecian hills.
Pale music through the garden spills,
I feel the floating gods go by;
And something far and tender thrills
Beneath a broad gean sky.

The white flocks dapple all the vale,
A sly nymph peeps between the trees,
On still blue water one white sail
Makes swallow flight before the breeze.
A temple on the mountains knees
Send up a drift of solemn smoke;
I hear the murmuring of the bees,
I see plough-oxen in the yoke.

And yonder, through the wooden glen,
Like some bright serpent in the sun,
I see the brazen march of men,
The bitter pomp of war begun.
Some clash of wills or evil done
Sets the day-flame upon the spears;
But high on scented thyme are spun
The dream that glitter through the years.



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Hodden is a coarse, grey cloth


Pipe, shepherd, pipe! The shadows creep
Across the plough-land and the steam.
The nibbled sward is for the sheep;
But shepherd eyes have caught the gleam
Of shadowy distances that teem
With sudden lights and ecstasy.
I breathe, far severed from that dream,
The thyme that scented Arcady!
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David McKee Wright
N.S.W.
The Bulletin, 7
th
August
1924

2
Arcadia. A region of Greece and according to myth
the home of the god Pan.