Here, void of will, of action unaware,
And dwindled to a mere perceptive point,
Changeless I watch the light divide the air
And glitter on each reedy knot and joint.
Changeless I watch the changes of the sky,
Its liquid blue, its motionless light clouds,—
A solitary seagull sailing by,
A butterfly that him from sight enshrouds.
Now midway-down a thin mist thunder-driven
Moves on the air-built battlements beyond;
Still is the land, until the heights of heaven
Burst and break backward, detonant with sound.
And on the earth fire and a flood are spilled,
The air is no more sultry, but the wind
Drives forward in the grass. The moor-fowl, chilled,
Huddle and crouch in hollows water-lined.
Then, all night long, grey spectres of the dark
Fly onward overhead in strange disguise,
With shriekings of the wind, and weird blue spark
Lighting their myriad white hail-like eyes.
But in the morning with a song the land
Resumes the primal harmony of dawn;
A lark the latest of its tuneful band,
Into the heart of Paradise is drawn
To sing that sweet and slender hymn that I
Have heard so many ages ever new,
Never the same, yet, as the world goes by,
The same hymn steeped in sunlight and in dew.
And sometimes in the reeds a feathered thing
Will shyly peer about, as though it sought
Some old forgotten love of kindred wing
Amid the grass with last year’s dead leaves fraught.
Sometimes a mouse will move, or spider thread
His amber beads betwixt the sky and me,
Sometimes a frozen swallow will fall dead,
Sometimes the southern winds will bring a bee.
Or sometimes in the later autumn days
A red-fanged rough retriever will come nigh,
Threading the scent all through that reedy maze,
And anxious, earnest, panting, pass me by.