If I could sing the song of the dawn,
The carroling word of leaf and bird
And the sun-waked fern uncurling there,
I would go lonely and would not care.
If I could sing the song of the dusk,
The stars and moon of glistening June
Lit at the foot and head of me,
The Spinner might break the thread of me.
If I could sing but the song of love.
Fill my throat with each sounding note.
Others might kiss and clasp and cling,
Mine be the lips that would sing, would sing!
(They put back the clocks at two A. M.)
TO-NIGHT, I think each sleepy clock
Will lift a pedant's protest to the skies
From many a town's high tower:
— Tick-tock — tick-tock —
Rude hands presume to put us back —
Tick-tack —
One hour! —
Time will not wait, they say,
Nor sun:
Yet is this vast thing done?
Shall the slow day
Submit, the calm moon cower?
O shadowy wings that lean in flight,
O night!
Before your star-eyed birds are flown.
All night the crickets chirp,
Like little stars of twinkling sound
In the dark silence.
They sparkle through the stillness
With a crisp rhythm:
They lift the shadows on their tiny voices.
But at the flickering note of birds that wake,
Flashing from tree to tree till all the wood is lit
With their golden coloratura of dawn,
The cricket-stars fade softly,
One by one.
I am so tired and weary,
So tired of the endless fight,
So weary of waiting the dawn
And finding endless night.
That I ask but rest and quiet -
Rest for days that are gone,
And quiet for the little space
That I must journey on.
The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.
Hills that were dark
At sparing-time last night
Now in the dawn-ring
Glimmer cold and white.
The flag let loose for a day of festivity;
Free desperate symbol of battle and desire,
Leaping, lunging, tossing up the halyards;
Below it a tumult of music,
Above it the streaming wastes of the sky,
Pinnacles of clouds, pyres of dawn,
Infinite effort, everlasting day.
The immense flag waving
Aloft in glory:
Over seas and hilltops
Transmitting its lightnings.
It is evening, and the earth
Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl.
Afar off there clink the polychrome points of the stars,
Indefatigable, after all these years!
Here upon earth there is life, and then death,
Dawn, and later nightfall,
Fire, and the quenching of embers:
But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part of
the world,
If the idea fits my fancy?
Dawns of marvellous light, wakeful, sleepy, weary, dancing dawns,
You are rose petals settling through the blue of my evening:
I light my pipe to salute you,
And sit puffing smoke in the air and never say a word.
I HEARD a bird at dawn
Singing sweetly on a tree,
That the dew was on the lawn,
And the wind was on the lea ;
But I didn't listen to him.
For he didn't sing to me.
I didn't listen to him,
For he didn't sing to me
That the dew was on the lawn
And the wind was on the lea ;
I was singing at the time
Just as prettily as he.
I was singing all the time.
Just as prettily as he,
About the dew upon the lawn
And the wind upon the lea ;
When the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon
Thrown through my window,
I know that hours of light
Are about to thrust themselves into me
Like omnivorous needles into listless cloth,
Threaded with the heavy colours of the sun.
They seem altogether too eager
To embroider this thing of mine,
My Day,
Into the strict patterns of an altar cloth;
Or at least to stitch it into a useful garment.
But I know they will do nothing of the kind.
They will prick away.
And when they are through with it
It will look like the patch quilt my grandmother made
When she was learning to sew.
Dreams — and an old, old waking,
An unspent vision gone;
Night, clean with silence, breaking
Into loud dawn.
A wonder that is blurring
The new day's strange demands,
The indomitable stirring
Of folded hands.
Then only the hours' pageant
And the drowsing sound of their creep,
Bringing at last the vagrant
Dreams of new sleep.
Life flings weariness over me
Like a thick grey veil; I see
Through its mesh where suns are cold,
Nights are ancient and dawns are old.
Now at last with glamour gone
I can see the naked dawn;
Gauge the hollow depths of noon,
Coolly question star and moon.
And where fired sunsets pale
I, who wear life's grey veil,
Shall not marvel, shall not care.
No light of earth's however fair.
Robbed of the sting of its surprise,
Can delude my sober eyes.