Among the stripped and sooty twigs of the wild cherry tree [Illustration: leaf] Sometimes they flit and swing as though two blossoms of the Spring [Illustration: leaf] Had quickened on these bleak October branches suddenly.
They are like fairy birds flown down from skies which no one knows, Their pointed yellow bills are bright as April daffodils, Their plumy whiteness heavenly as January snows.
Loveliest guests that choose our garden-plot for loitering! Oh, what a sudden flower of joy is set upon the hour When in their cherry cages two white blackbirds sit and swing.
The nightingales around our house Among the lovely orchard boughs: Where the young apple-dawn too soon Turns whiter than the daylit moon, And ’mid its shadowy silver bowers The quince is flushed with heavenly flowers That opening poise as though for flight: The nightingales sing day and night, With piercing, long, insistent calling, And chuckle of sweet waters falling, And unimaginable trill That makes my heart beat and stand still.
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.
Now 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.
The 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.