I gaze as they: as kind she is, as fair,
As when long since a younger heart drank deep
From that sweet solace, while, through summer air,
Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.
O as I stand this latest moon beholding,
Her forms unresting memory is moulding;
Beneath my enchanted eyelids there arise
Visions again of many moons that were,
Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies.
Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.
6
Unnumbered are those moons of memory
Stored in the backward chambers of my brain:
The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,
The golden harvest moon above the grain;
The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,
The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,
Filtering through the meshes of the green
To breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;
Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screen
The bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;
7
Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,
Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;
The fairy moons of luminous evenings,
Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;
Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,
When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,
Erect and heavy, and all waters lie
Oily, and there is not a bird that sings.
All these I know, I have seen them born and die,
And many another moon in many a sky.
8
There was a moon that shone above the ground
Where on a grassy forest height I stood;
Bright was that open place, and all around
The dense discovered treetops of the wood,
Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,
Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;
Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.
Protruding from the middle of the mound,
Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,
Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.
9
A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,
Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;
An orator exultant in defeat;
Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;
My heart was one with those rebellious people,
Until along a chapel's pointing steeple
My eyes unwitting wandered, and I found
A moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;
And in my spirit's life all human din
Died, and eternal Silence stood within.