The herring-gulls with peevish cries
Rebuke the man who sings vain words;
His sheep-dog growls a low complaint,
Then turns to chasing butterflies.
But when the indifferent singing-birds
From midmost down to dimmest shore
Innumerably confirm their songs,
And grasshoppers make summer rhyme
And solemn bees in the wild thyme
Clash cymbals and beat gongs,
The shepherd’s words once more are faint,
Once more the alien song is thinned
Upon the long course of the wind,
He sings, he sings no more.
Ah now the dear monotonies
Of bells that jangle on the sheep
To the low limit of the hills!
Till the blue cup of music spills
Into the boughs of lowland trees;
Till thence the lowland singings creep
Into the dreamful shepherd’s head,
Creep drowsily through his blood;
The young thrush fluting all he knows,
The ring dove moaning his false woes,
Almost the rabbit’s tiny tread,
The last unfolding bud.
But now,
Now a cool word spreads out along the sea.
Now the day’s violet is cloud-tipped with gold.
Now dusk most silently
Fills the hushed day with other wings than birds’.
Now where on foam-crest waves the seagulls rock,
To their cliff-haven go the seagulls thence.
So too the shepherd gathers in his flock,
Because birds journey to their dens,
Tired sheep to their still fold.
A dark first bat swoops low and dips
About the shepherd who now sings
A song of timeless evenings;
For dusk is round him with wide wings,
Dusk murmurs on his moving lips.
There is not mortal man who knows
From whence the shepherd’s song arose:
It came a thousand years ago.
Once the world’s shepherds woke to lead
The folded sheep that they might feed
On green downs where winds blow.
One shepherd sang a golden word.
A thousand miles away one heard.
One sang it swift, one sang it slow.
Two skylarks heard, two skylarks told
All shepherds this same song of gold
On all downs where winds blow.
This is the song that shepherds must
Sing till the green downlands be dust
And tide of sheep-drift no more flow;
The song two skylarks told again
To all the sheep and shepherd men
On green downs where winds blow.