Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,--
Sailed on a river of misty light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sung a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored our Earth to joy,
Have you departed, every one,
And left a desert sky?
All through the night, your glorious eyes
Were gazing down in mine,
And, with a full heart's thankful sighs,
I blessed that watch divine.
I was at peace, and drank your beams
As they were life to me;
And revelled in my changeful dreams,
Like petrel on the sea.
Thought followed thought, star followed star
Through boundless regions on;
While one sweet influence, near and far,
Thrilled through, and proved us one!
Sleep! Cast thy canopy
Over this sleeper's brain,
Dim grow his memory,
When he wake again.
Love stays a summer night,
Till lights of morning come;
Then takes her winged flight
Back to her starry home.
Sleep! Yet thy days are mine;
Love's seal is over thee:
Far though my ways from thine,
Dim though thy memory.
Love stays a summer night,
Till lights of morning come;
Then takes her winged flight
Back to her starry home.
DOWNHILL I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.
Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
I WAS not apprenticed nor ever dwelt in famous
Lincolnshire;
I've served one master ill and well much more than
seven year;
And never took up to poaching as you shall quickly
find;
But 'tis my delight of a shiny night in the season
of the year.
I roamed where nobody had a right but keepers and
squires, and there
I sought for nests, wild flowers, oak sticks, and
moles, both far and near.
And had to run from farmers, and learnt the
Lincolnshire song:
"Oh, 'tis my delight of a shiny night in the
season of the year."
RAIN, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
NOVEMBER'S days are thirty:
November's earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest things on ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.
THE skylarks are far behind that sang over the
down;
I can hear no more those suburb nightingales;
Thrushes and blackbirds sing in the gardens of the
town
In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine
prevails.
But the call of children in the unfamiliar streets
That echo with a familiar twilight echoing,
Sweet as the voice of nightingale or lark, completes
A magic of strange welcome, so that I seem a king
Among man, beast, machine, bird, child, and the
ghost
That in the echo lives and with the echo dies.
The friendless town is friendly; homeless, I
not lost;
IT stood in the sunset sky
Like the straight-backed down,
Many a time--the barn
At the edge of the town,
So huge and dark that it seemed
It was the hill
Till the gable's precipice proved
It impossible.
Then the great down in the west
Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;
And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness.
IT was a perfect day
For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco-dust.
I tasted deep the hour
Between the far
Owl's chuckling first soft cry
And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;
Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.
UNDER the after-sunset sky
Two pewits sport and cry,
More white than is the moon on high
Riding the dark surge silently;
More black than earth. Their cry
Is the one sound under the sky.
They alone move, now low, now high,
And merrily they cry
To the mischievous Spring sky,
Plunging earthward, tossing high,
Over the ghost who wonders why
So merrily they cry and fly,
Nor choose 'twixt earth and sky,
While the moon's quarter silently
Rides, and earth rests as silently.
WILL you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
At my side?
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come
If the night
Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
If the noon
Gave light,