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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.
I want to see your face under the moonlight,
I want to see you in the last rays of the sun,
I want to see you first thing in the morning,
When the rain pours and the snow falls.
I want to see you in your happiest moments and your saddest hours.
I want to see the way your face lights up when you talk about something you love,
I want to see the way you look at me when I turn away,
The face you make when you're concentrating or thinking.
I crave the simplicity of your raw human emotion and the bitter complexities of it.
Let me feel how you embrace those you love,
How you hold someone's hand or wipe away their tears.
Let me see everything that you are and everything that you want to be.
Enchantment on the river
And magic on the lake,
The world has turned to crystal,
Don't speak or it will break!
The road seems new, the valley
An unfamiliar place,
Where trees are trimmed with spangles
And stones with silver lace.
A pink and white, furred rabbit
With a star-tuft for a tail,
Hops up the hill by moonlight
And leaves a fairy trail.
I think we mar the meadow
So white, and smooth as suede,
We ought to shine in satin
Or glitter in brocade.
I have grown pale and paler
Since one went away,
Who passed from me as softly
As daylight leaves the day.
My hair has lost its gleaming,
The light has left my face,
I am a grey-eyed wanderer
In any lonely place.
And on my heart is moonlight
Like white rain on the sea.
And I am of the evening
As the evening is of me.
A gentle moan, remembrance,
A folded wing is love,
Since my dream stepped into shadow
On the soft feet of a dove.
The disbeliever walked the moonlit place,
Outside of gates of hammered serafin,
Observing the moon-blotches on the walls.
The yellow rocked across the still façades,
Or else sat spinning on the pinnacles,
While he imagined humming sounds and sleep.
The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
And each blank window of the building balked
His loneliness and what was in his mind:
If in a shimmering room the babies came,
Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,
It was because night nursed them in its fold.
Night nursed not him in whose dark mind
The clambering wings of birds of black revolved,
Making harsh torment of the solitude.
The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
The spring is fresh and fearless
And every leaf is new,
The world is brimmed with moonlight,
The lilac brimmed with dew.
Here in the moving shadows
I catch my breath and sing--
My heart is fresh and fearless
And over-brimmed with spring.
It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.
The heart asks more than life can give,
When that is learned, then all is learned;
The waves break fold on jewelled fold,
But beauty itself is fugitive,
It will not hurt me when I am old.
Moonlight bends over black silence,
Making it bloom to wild-flowers of sound
That only green things can hear.
A wind sprawls over an orchard,
Frightening its silent litany to sound.
A thread of star-light has fallen to this tree
And curls among its leaves, tangling them to silence....
Standing amidst these things, Beloved,
We feel the words our hearts cannot form.
My apple trees have blossomed in a night,
And pale green moonlight bathes their rose and white
With a strange wine that makes the pulses throb.
A sleepy robin now mistakes the light,
And his soft doubting note sounds like a sob
Voicing the thought that draws my heart-strings tight.
What Life could give you is not yours to take
Nor mine to give--and yet to-night I wake
Remembering your giving. But the note
Of that moon-haunted robin must not shake
My calm belief that you--austere, remote--
Need nothing I can ever mar or make.
In a little Hungarian cafe
Men and women are drinking
Yellow wine in tall goblets.
Through the milky haze of the smoke,
The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
Leans to his violin
As to the breast of a woman.
Red hair kindles to fire
On the black of his coat-sleeve,
Where his white thin hand
Trembles and dives,
Like a sliver of moonlight,
When wind has broken the water.
Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors...
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.
You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall...
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.
When the moonlight strikes the tree-tops,
The trees are not the same.
I know they are not the same,
Because there is one tree that is missing,
And it stood so long by another,
That the other, feeling lonely,
Now is slowly dying too.
When the moonlight strikes the tree-tops
That dead tree comes back;
Like a great blue sphere of smoke
Half buoyed, half ravelling on the grass,
Rustling through frayed branches,
Something eerily cheeping through it,
Something creeping through its shade.