How beautiful to wake at night
Within the room grown strange and still and sweet
And live a century while in the dark
The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns,
To watch the window open on the night,
A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,
And, lying thus, to feel dilate within
The press, the conflict and the heavy pulse
Of incommunicable sad ecstasy
Growing until the body seems outstretched
In perfect crucifixion on the arms
Of a cross pointing from last void to void
While the heart dies to a mere midway spark!
All happiness thou holdest, happy night,
How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Another night, in darkness yet more still
Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,
Filled rather by the perfumes' wandering flood
Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,
Shall from the furthest utter silences
In glimmering secrecy have gathered up
An host of whisperings and scattered sighs
To loose at last a sound as of the plunge
And lapsing seeth of some Pacific wave
Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,
Rolls in to wreath with languorous foam away
The flutter of the golden moths that haunt
The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands!
So beautiful it is to wake at night
Imagination, loudening with the surf
Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,
Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote
Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep
To bear me on the summit of her wave
Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge,
Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised
Above the frontiers of infinity,
To which in the full reflux of the wave
Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,
Borne to those other shores—now never mine
Save for an hovering instant, short as this
Which now sustains me, ere I be drawn back,
To learn again and wholly learn I trust
How beautiful it is to wake at night.
ROBERT NICHOLS
The Black Mountains, 1919
Elsie Inglis
Who is it lies here
Betwixt the wind and the water,
Whom all Scotland mourns
As a mother for her daughter?