Once, on the far blue hills, <br />Alone with the pine and the cloud, in those high still places; <br />Alone with a whisper of ferns and a chuckle of rills, <br />And the peat-brown pools that mirrored the angels’ faces, <br />Pools that mirrored the wood-pigeon’s grey-blue feather, <br />And all my thistledown dreams as they drifted along; <br />Once, oh, once, on the hills, thro’ the red-bloomed heather <br />I followed an elfin song. <br /> <br /> <br />Once, by the wellsprings of joy, <br />In the glens of the hart’s-tongue fern, where the brooks came leaping <br />Over the rocks, like a scrambling bare-foot boy <br />That never had heard of a world grown old with weeping; <br />Once, thro’ the golden gorse (do the echoes linger <br />In Paradise woods, where the foam of the may runs wild?) <br />I followed the flute of a light-foot elfin singer, <br />A god with the eyes of a child. <br /> <br /> <br />Once, he sang to me there, <br />From a crag on a thyme-clad height where the dew still glistened; <br />He sang like the spirit of Spring in that dawn-flushed air, <br />While the angels opened their doors and the whole sky listened: <br />He sang like the soul of a rainbow, if heaven could hear it, <br />Beating to heaven, on wings that were April’s own; <br />A song too happy and brave for the heart to bear it, <br />Had the heart of the hearer known. <br /> <br /> <br />Once, ah, once, no more, <br />The hush and the rapture of youth in those holy places, <br />The stainless height, the hearts that sing and adore <br />Till the sky breaks out into flower with the angels’ faces! <br />Once, in the dawn, they were mine; but the noon bereft me. <br />At midnight now, in an ebb of the loud world’s roar, <br />I catch but a broken stave of the songs that left me <br />On hills that are mine no more.<br /><br />Alfred Noyes<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-hills-of-youth/
