Les plus lus ▸
Harold Monro
Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn :
It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond
Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond
Stares. And you sing, you sing.
That star-enchanted song falls through the air
From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,
Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground ;
While all the night you sing.
My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee,
As all night long I listen, and my brain
Receives your song, then loses it again
In moonlight on the lawn.
Now is your voice a marble high and white,
Then like a mist on fields of paradise ;
Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,
Then breaks, and it is dawn.
Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell? I humbly crave,
Let me once know.
I sought thee in a secret cave,
And ask'd, if Peace were there,
A hollow wind did seem to answer, No:
Go seek elsewhere.
I did; and going did a rainbow note:
Surely, thought I,
This is the lace of Peace's coat:
I will search out the matter.
But while I looked the clouds immediately
Did break and scatter.
Then went I to a garden and did spy
A gallant flower,
The crown-imperial: Sure, said I,
Peace at the root must dwell.
When they said the time to hide was mine,
I hid back under a thick grape vine.
And while I was still for the time to pass,
A little gray thing came out of the grass.
He hopped his way through the melon bed
And sat down close by a cabbage head.
He sat down close where I could see,
And his big still eyes looked hard at me,
His big eyes bursting out of the rim,
And I looked back very hard at him.
The pale road winds faintly upward into the dark skies,
And beside it on the rough grass that the wind invisibly stirs,
Sheltered by sharp-speared gorse and the berried junipers,
Shining steadily with a green light, the glow-worm lies.
We regard it ; and this hill and all the other hills
That fall in folds to the river, very smooth and steep,
And the hangers and brakes that the darkness thickly fills
Fade like phantoms round the light and night is deep, so deep,—
That all the world is emptiness about the still flame
And we are small shadows standing lost in the huge night.
We gather up the glow-worm, stooping with dazzled sight,
And carry it to the little enclosed garden whence we came,
bury me in the spring garden
empty me of use and art
and people me with plague
for all the news is that we must go to war
so I may prove I did
what I could
business done you turn
into the garden
green and dark
asking questions of travel
answered in words of night
like a lover or a church
with its yellow bird’s eye
the old garden
reading the book of night
all morning I turn
the garden up
standing in the rows
I look at myself
a simple argument for oats
before art broke me
where I carried a cross like a prize
where I bled ink and coffee
where it all evened out
with war for discourse
I spoke but did not see
but at night in the garden
I thought of you
what harm might come from joy
God knows
how little fit we are for it
night comes into the garden
as it ought to
raw as all life
and we discourse of our own tricks
talking and laughing
at the folly of some neighbor
the night is a garden
in her perfect fear of us
who rave that everything must break
while government continues
what will become of doing business
with so busy a rust
green ink at the office
life should not be less
than half hope
deer in the garden
a letter to my wife
telling her my mind