Oh, even so, by night and day
When first the earth broke into May
Ere men shut thunder up in shells,
They came and sang their miracles;
And so, in myriad Mays to come,
When all those damnèd storms are dumb
And only heaven’s lightning crowns
Her clouds of thunder on the Downs,
They still will come, by night and day
To sing the radiant Spring away,
Till men lie crumbled with their towns
And earth no more breaks into May.
NIGHT-PIECE.
OW independent, beautiful and proud,
Out of the vanishing body of a cloud
Like its arisen soul the full moon swims
Over the sea, into whose distant brims
Has flowed the last of the light. I am alone.
Even the diving gannet now is flown
From these unpeopled sands. A mist lies cold
Upon the muffled boundaries of the world.
The lovely earth whose silence is so deep
Is folded up in night, but not in sleep.
BEFORE WINTER.
HE day is gone of the sun and the swallow
And the glory on the trees:
Before the gale the length of the pave
The dry old corpse of a plane-leaf flees,
And its step is harsh and hollow
As it chatters into its grave.
The shivering dawn now hides and slouches
Long in the cover of dark,
Till up the sky, like a murderer pale,
He drags at last a dull red mark,
And the hound of the grey wind crouches
And pants on his rusty trail.