Summer’s Armies

 

Some rainbow coming from the fair!

Some vision of the world Cashmere

I confidently see!

Or else a peacock’s purple train,

Feather by feather, on the plain

Fritters itself away!

The dreamy butterflies bestir,

Lethargic pools resume the whir

Of last year’s sundered tune.

From some old fortress on the sun

Baronial bees march, one by one,

In murmuring platoon!

The robins stand as thick to-day

As flakes of snow stood yesterday,

On fence and roof and twig.

The orchis binds her feather on

For her old lover, Don the Sun,

Revisiting the bog!

Without commander, countless, still,

The regiment of wood and hill

In bright detachment stand.

Behold! Whose multitudes are these?

The children of whose turbaned seas,

Or what Circassian land?

 

Emily Dickinson

From: Poems by Emily Dickinson Series One

Edited by two of her friends Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson