The crescent moon is large enough to linger
A little while after the twilight goes,
This moist midsummer night the garden perfumes
Are earth and apple, dewy pine and rose.
Over my head four new-cut stars are glinting
And the inevitable night draws on;
I am alone, the old terror takes me,
Evenings will come like this when I am gone;
Evenings on evenings, years on years forever--
Be taut, my spirit, close upon and keep
The scent, the brooding chill, the gliding fire-fly,
A poem learned before I fall asleep.
Holds a single tranquil evening close, sensing its fleeting beauty before night closes in
Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
So near, a long arm man can pick off stars,
Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
So near you are, summer stars,
So near, strumming, strumming,
So lazy and hum-strumming.
Reaches into a lazy, intimate night sky where stars hang near enough to pick
NAUGHT moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.
Long hours since dawn grew,--spread,--and passed
on high
And deep below,--I have watched the cool reeds
hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.
Floats in a glassy lake's mirrored calm, with nothing to do but lie content
Fireflies flicker in the tops of trees.
Flicker in the lower branches.
Skim along the ground.
Over the moon-white lilies
Is a flashing and ceasing of small, lemon-green stars.
As you lean against me,
Moon-white,
The air all about you
Is slit, and pricked, and pointed with sparkles of lemon-green flame
Starting out of a background of vague, blue trees.
Turns an evening stroll into a tender drift through firefly-lit, moon-white air
A languid atmosphere, a lazy breeze,
With labored respiration, moves the wheat
From distant reaches, till the golden seas
Break in crisp whispers at my feet.
My book, neglected of an idle mind,
Hides for a moment from the eyes of men;
Or lightly opened by a critic wind,
Affrightedly reviews itself again.
Off through the haze that dances in the shine
The warm sun showers in the open glade,
The forest lies, a silhouette design
Dimmed through and through with shade.
A dreamy day; and tranquilly I lie
At anchor from all storms of mental strain;
With absent vision, gazing at the sky,
"Like one that hears it rain."
Surrenders to the heavy-eyed drowsiness of a golden afternoon with no demands
We had to wait for the heat to pass,
And I was lying on the grass,
While Mother sat outside the door,
And I saw how many stars there were.
Beyond the tree, beyond the air,
And more and more were always there.
So many that I think they must
Be sprinkled on the sky like dust.
A dust is coming through the sky!
And I felt myself begin to cry.
So many of them and so small,
Suppose I cannot know them all.
A child's wide-eyed summer night wonder under a sky that feels endless
Torridly the moon rolls upward
Against the smooth immensity of midsummer sky,
Changeless, inexhaustible:
The city beneath is still:
Heaven and Earth are clasped together,
Momently life grows as careless
As the life of the intense stars.
Out of the houses climbing,
Fuming up windows, flickering from every roof-top,
Rigid on sonorous pinnacles,
Silently swirl aloft
Love's infinite flamelets.
Midsummer heat and stillness where city and sky dissolve into love
Open the window, and let the air
Freshly blow upon face and hair,
And fill the room, as it fills the night,
With the breath of the rain's sweet might.
Hark! the burthen, swift and prone!
And how the odorous limes are blown!
Stormy Love's abroad, and keeps
Hopeful coil for gentle sleeps.
Not a blink shall burn to-night
In my chamber, of sordid light;
Nought will I have, not a window-pane,
'Twixt me and the air and the great good rain,
Which ever shall sing me sharp lullabies;
And God's own darkness shall close mine eyes;
And I will sleep, with all things blest,
In the pure earth-shadow of natural rest.
Open-window ease, letting the stormy rain lull you into deep rest
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
The ache of staying inside while a bright summer evening calls you out
In the wild soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles
Glinting on black satin.
The rail along the curving pathway
Was low in a happy place to let us cross,
And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled my hair. . . .
The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.
And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom
A riverbank June night that brings back an old romance you can't forget
A summer song it was,
Counting of many unseen stars
In an intangible sky
Making new milky ways--
Silver-shadow-paths that lead
From sapphire abysses
Into deeper abysses still.
The deeps of our souls
Lit by passion's burning flowers
Tremulous, timorous flames of silver,
That with thousand hands
Our hearts sought to pluck and scatter,
Or make barbed garlands
For love's nuptial hour.
Nuptial hour, briefer than a moment,
Longer than Heaven's Eternal summer,
Transforms a warm evening into an eternal cosmic summer where passion blazes without end
To the tired traveller in summer's heat,
The thought of airy trees is sweet.
Come, in my straight stretched arms discover
A leafy road, thou weary Lover.
Offers a leafy avenue as a cool refuge for a tired traveler on a summer's heat
'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.
A serene, moonlit night of restful stillness under sheltering trees
IT was upon a July evening.
At a stile I stood, looking along a path
Over the country by a second Spring
Drenched perfect green again. "The lattermath
Will be a fine one." So the stranger said,
A wandering man. Albeit I stood at rest,
Flushed with desire I was. The earth outspread,
Like meadows of the future, I possessed.
And as an unaccomplished prophecy
The stranger's words, after the interval
Of a score years, when those fields are by me
Never to be recrossed, now I recall,
This July eve, and question, wondering,
What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?
A July evening of desire and quiet longing that lingers across the years
The opal afternoon
Is cool, and very still.
A wash of tawny air,
Sea-green that melts to gold,
Bathes all the skyline, hill by hill.
Out of the black-topped pinelands
A black crow calls,
And the year seems old!
A woman from a doorway sings,
And from the valley-slope a sheep-dog barks,
And through the umber woods the echo falls.
Then silence on the still world lies,
And faint and far the birds fly south,
And behind the dark pines drops the sun,
And a small wind wakes and sighs,
And Summer, see, is done!
A still, gold afternoon where summer fades into evening and the year turns old
The wind waves oer the meadows green
And shakes my own wild flowers
And shifts about the moving scene
Like the life of summer hours;
The little bents with reedy head,
The scarce seen shapes of flowers,
All kink about like skeins of thread
In these wind-shaken hours.
All stir and strife and life and bustle
In everything around one sees;
The rushes whistle, sedges rustle,
The grass is buzzing round like bees;
The butterflies are tossed about
Like skiffs upon a stormy sea;
The bees are lost amid the rout
And drop in [their] perplexity.
Lively meadow winds and a romantic invitation capture the aimless warmth of a summer evening
Summer looked for long am I:
Much shall change or e'er I die.
Prithee take it not amiss
Though I weary thee with bliss.
Reflects the fleeting sweetness of summer, perfect for savoring a moment with no rush
The glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,
Goes trembling past me up the College wall.
Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping,
The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.
Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,
Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,
Passes the world with shadows at their feet
Going left and right.
Remote, although I hear the beggar's cough,
See the woman's twinkling fingers tend him a
coin,
I sit absolved, assured I am better off
Beyond a world I never want to join.
Sunlit, detached vantage point from a quiet window embodies unhurried summer repose
A LADDER sticking up at the open window,
The top of an old ladder ;
And all of Summer is there.
Great waves and tufts of wistaria surge across the window,
And a thin, belated blossom
Jerks up and down in the sunlight ;
Purple translucence against the blue sky.
"Tie back this branch," I say,
But my hands are sticky with leaves.
And my nostrils widen to the smell of crushed green.
The ladder moves uneasily at the open window.
And I call to the man beneath,
"Tie back that branch."
There is a ladder leaning against the window-sill.
And a mutter of thunder in the air.
Lush, sticky late-summer heat and drowsy stillness match content having nowhere to be
The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening's breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.
There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
The dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town.
Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and forever
It trembles, but it never fades away;
Serene twilight stillness over a mirrored stream evokes a peaceful evening with no demands
The vision of the sunset light
Of ghostly white :
The day is the twilight perfume
Too full to fly away.
O, Japan in milky July,
What an art of dream untold !
You know, over the blue and deep of the seas,
(O the wilderness of the Pacific!)
Like a lantern in love-air, she sways
In pain that is song.
Milky July twilight with a lantern-like sway — a dreamy nowhere to be
Earth tips to the west
And the hills lean backward —
Cedar-trees
Hugging the hillsides.
Smoke drifts in the valley —
The pinto sun
Nickers over the gate
Of the home corral.
The day's end feels like a sun-horse heading home to a quiet corral
The church bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More harkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some blind spell: seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crowned.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp,—
That 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go
Into oblivion—that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.
Evening's melancholy softens into hope of fresh flowers and eternal renewal
There is a place of grass
With daisies like white pools,
Or shining islands in a sea
Of brightening waves.
Swallows, darting, brush
The waves of gentle green,
As though a wide still lake it were,
Not living grass.
Evening draws over all,
Grass and flowers and sky,
And one rich bird prolongs the sweet
Of day on the edge of dark.
The grass is dim, the stars
Lean down the height of heaven;
And the trees, listening in all their leaves,
Scarce-breathing stand.
Dusk deepens and the whole world listens, breathless, to the fading day
Hushed in the smoky haze of summer sunset,
When I came home again from far-off places,
How many times I saw my western city
Dream by her river.
Then for an hour the water wore a mantle
Of tawny gold and mauve and misted turquoise
Under the tall and darkened arches bearing
Gray, high-flung bridges.
Against the sunset, water-towers and steeples
Flickered with fire up the slope to westward,
And old warehouses poured their purple shadows
Across the levee.
High over them the black train swept with thunder,
Cleaving the city, leaving far beneath it
Wharf-boats moored beside the old side-wheelers
Resting in twilight.
A returning home held in hazy summer sunset, city dreaming by the river
Do you know how the dream looms? how if summer
misses one of us the two of us miss summer —
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long
breath for the change to low contralto singing
mornings when the green corn leaves first break
through the black loam —
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody
of the moon songs in the light nights when the
earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains
lighter than a goose down —
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the
laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind
motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations
of slow sea water on the shingle silver
in the wind —
Silver moonlight and wind in hickories capture the unhurried magic of a warm summer evening with no place to be
THE summer sun shone round me,
The folded valley lay
In a stream of sun and odour,
That sultry summer day.
The tall trees stood in the sunlight
As still as still could be,
But the deep grass sighed and rustled
And bowed and beckoned me.
The deep grass moved and whispered
And bowed and brushed my face.
It whispered in the sunshine:
"The winter comes apace."
A sultry, idle summer day where the grass itself whispers that winter comes, grounding timeless ease in fleeting warmth
When June comes dancing o’er the death of May,
With scarlet roses tinting her green breast,
And mating thrushes ushering in her day,
And Earth on tiptoe for her golden guest,
I always see the evening when we met--
The first of June baptized in tender rain--
And walked home through the wide streets, gleaming wet,
Arms locked, our warm flesh pulsing with love’s pain.
I always see the cheerful little room,
And in the corner, fresh and white, the bed,
Sweet scented with a delicate perfume,
Wherein for one night only we were wed;
Where in the starlit stillness we lay mute,
And heard the whispering showers all night long,
And your brown burning body was a lute
Whereon my passion played his fevered song.
A June evening of locked arms and warm rain recalls the completeness of a moment that had no rush and no restraint
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
The summer night waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and grey 'twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn,
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn.
The slow shift from twilight to dawn over cornfields offers a patient, contemplative ease for a night with nowhere to be
LECHLADE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE.
The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
Each vapour that obscured the sunset's ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
Responding to the charm with its own mystery.
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
Thou too, aereal Pile! whose pinnacles
Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,
A still, silent evening over a churchyard where even death feels like peaceful sleep in the warmth of a summer dusk
Afternoon sunlight limps tenuously away,
Leaving a snarled retrospect of golden foot-marks.
The sea is pregnant with gracious discords
That falteringly shroud the sleep-rhythmed breasts of winds.
The sky is a genially vacant stare.
Remaining touches of starlight
Tremble the leaves when air is still....
And so my love for you strolls through this day,
Picking up forgotten hints of its heart.
A leisurely stroll through fading gold, gathering love like scattered memories
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.
Evening peace of smoking in silence, knowing night elsewhere is dawn
Steps of rose
On rosier steps;
Thus, evening
Builds her staircase
Between sunset
And the infinite roof of space.
So our fancies
May fold their wings,
And walk on gleams
Of unending purple and pink,
Up to the blue pool . . .
And drink from its starry rim.
Rising on rosy twilight steps into an unhurried, infinite calm
All essences of sweetness from the white
Warm day go up in vapor, when the dark
Comes down. Ascends the tune of meadow-lark,
Ascends the noon-time smell of grass, when night
Takes sunlight from the world, and gives it ease.
Mysterious wings have brushed the air ; and light
Float all the ghosts of sense and sound and sight ;
The silent hive is echoing the bees.
So stir my thoughts at this slow, solemn time.
Now only is there certainty for me
When all the day's distilled and understood.
Now light meets darkness : now my tendrils climb
In this vast hour, up the living tree,
Where gloom foregathers, and the stern winds brood.
A vast, quiet hour where day distilled into certainty and stillness
Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree
Near-by :
It seems to burn its way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.
Sunlit idleness pierced by a hot, fiery summer voice
HARRY, you know at night
The larks in Castle Alley
Sing from the attic's height
As if the electric light
Were the true sun above a summer valley:
Whistle, don't knock, to-night.
I shall come early, Kate:
And we in Castle Alley
Will sit close out of sight
Alone, and ask no light
Of lamp or sun above a summer valley:
To-night I can stay late.
An alley transformed into a summer valley by electric light captures the ease of a warm evening with nowhere to be
See how the agèd trembling hands of Day
Spill over the white cloth and tea-cups blue,
Red wine from his last goblet poured away;
So let me by the window sit with you,
And watch the sun drop down behind the trees,
Or gleam across the snow--a crimson bar;
For in still, mystic moments such as these
Down unknown by-ways we may wander far.
The crimson turns to purple on the snow,
The orange sky grown gray, and glimmering lights
Of scattered star-lamps through the darkness glow;
But neither Night nor Death my soul affrights,
For clear there gleams, all earthly dark above,
The ever-burning star-lamp of your love.
Watching a crimson sunset fade at the window with a beloved embodies unhurried twilight contentment
Supper comes at five o'clock,
At six, the evening star,
My lover comes at eight o'clock--
But eight o'clock is far.
How could I bear my pain all day
Unless I watched to see
The clock-hands laboring to bring
Eight o'clock to me.
The long, lazy wait for eight o'clock turns an ordinary evening into a languid stretch of anticipation
We walked in the dew, in the drowsy starlight
To the sleepless, sleepy sound
Of insects singing in the low sea-meadows
For miles and miles around;
With a wheel and a whirr the resistless rhythm
Trembled incessantly;
Antares was red in the sky before us,
And behind us, the blackness of the sea.
A dew-drenched walk under drowsy starlight, with insects droning and no end in view, breathes a summer night's freedom
THE sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted
Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
We turned from men or poetry
To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined;
Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge; or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
Slow walks through sunlit fields with no fixed destination recall a time when warmth and ease ruled the hours