| COME away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes, | |
| And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water; | |
| There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland | |
| Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us. | |
| There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn | 5 |
| Put off the summer’s languor with a touch that made us glad | |
| For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow, | |
| To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores. | |
| |
| Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling, | |
| Calling us to come to them, and roam no more. | 10 |
| Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us, | |
| There’s an old song calling us to come! | |
| |
| Come away! come away!—for the scenes we leave behind us | |
| Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that’s young forever; | |
| And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind, | 15 |
| That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains. | |
| The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us, | |
| And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years; | |
| But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us | |
| In the strangeness of home-coming, and a woman’s waiting eyes. | 20 |
| |
| Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us— | |
| Nothing now to comfort us, but love’s road home:— | |
| Over there beyond the darkness there’s a window gleams to greet us, | |
| And a warm hearth waits for us within. | |
| |
| Come away! come away!—or the roving-fiend will hold us, | 25 |
| And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring: | |
| There are no men yet may leave him when his hands are clutched upon them, | |
| There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother. | |
| So we’ll be up and on the way, and the less we boast the better | |
| For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know:— | 30 |
| The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it, | |
| And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see. | |
| |
| Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us— | |
| Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh | |
| That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes, | 35 |
| And the long fall wind on the lake. | |
