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.
Come, let us all sing very high
And all sing very loud
And keep on singing in the street
Until there’s quite a crowd;
And keep on singing in the house
And up and down the stairs;
Then underneath the furniture
Let’s all play Polar bears;
And crawl about with doormats on,
And growl and howl and squeak,
Then in the garden let us fly
And play at hide and seek;
And “Here we gather Nuts and May,”
“I wrote a Letter” too,
“Here we go round the Mulberry Bush,”
“The Child who lost its shoe”;
This is not water running here,
These thick rebellious streams
That hurtle flesh and bone past fear
Down alleyways of dreams.
This is a wine that must flow on
Not caring how nor where,
So it has ways to flow upon
Where song is in the air.
So it can woo an artful flute
With loose, elastic lips,
Its measurement of joy compute
With blithe, ecstatic hips.
'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
Came children walking two and two, in read, and blue, and green:
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.
Oh what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wild they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among:
Beneath them sit the aged man, wise guardians of the poor.
the swan all alone
growing so sickly it dreams
of dead tunes
alone with my song
I find on the shore
an old boat
like the last drinking horn
green and thin
going places
on the little map of the hand
a room is half
as good as a shed
I get out
with my song
in a hole
the strangest life sings
on air
in my ear
water goes to water again
and I to song
to live for music is enough
the ear in ecstasy
and all the imaginable world
made of alterations
while I tried to compose a duo
in a rain-drunk land
who could it be singing
with so much pleasure
to herself
who is in mourning
who with an ear is not
but not seeing how to help it
I walk to the park
to the great elm
and walnut filled with stories
and in a ruined garden
a little girl singing
day of new vows
all the rough hill sang