These I Singing In Spring

These I singing in spring collect for lovers,
(For who but I should understand lovers and all their sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences where the old stones thrown there,
	pick'd from the fields, have accumulated,
(Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones and 
	partly cover them, beyond these I pass,)
Far, far in the forest, or sauntering later in summer, before I think
	where I go,
Solitary, smelling the earthly smell, stopping now and then in the 
	silence,
Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or
	neck,
They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a great
	crowd, and I in the middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them,
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever is near me,
Here, lilac, with a brach of pine,
Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a live-oak in
	Florida as it hung trailing down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly love me, and returns again never
	to separate from me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this cala-
	mus-root shall,
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!)