The Bird at Dawn
What I saw was just one eye
In the dawn as I was going:
A bird can carry all the sky
In that little button glowing.
Never in my life I went
So deep into the firmament.
He was standing on a tree,
All in blossom overflowing;
And he purposely looked hard at me,
At first, as if to question merrily:
'Where are you going?'
But next some far more serious thing to say:
I could not answer, could not look away.
Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye:
Little mirror of all sky! —
And then the after-song another tree
Held, and sent radiating back on me.
If no man had invented human word,
And a bird-song had been
The only way to utter what we mean,
What would we men have heard,
What understood, what seen,
Between the trills and pauses, in between
The singing and the silence of a bird?
[John Masefield]
Seven Poems
| I | Here in the self is all that man can know Of Beauty, all the wonder, all the power, All the unearthly colour, all the glow, Here in the self which withers like a flower; Here in the self which fades as hours pass, And droops and dies and rots and is forgotten Sooner, by ages, than the mirroring glass In which it sees its glory still unrotten. Here in the flesh, within the flesh, behind, Swift in the blood and throbbing on the bone, Beauty herself, the universal mind, Eternal April wandering alone; The God, the holy Ghost, the atoning Lord, Here in the flesh, the never yet explored. |