Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves : Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass : Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine : I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus Hymenæal, Or triumphal chaunt, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be : Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 1820. THE NIGHTINGALE. DAYLIGHT on its last purple cloud 'Tis scattered in a thousand notes, Rosalind and Helen. THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE. A WOODMAN whose rough heart was out of tune (I think such hearts yet never came to good) Hated to hear, under the stars or moon, One nightingale in an interfluous wood Or as the moonlight fills the open sky Like clouds above the flower from which they rose, In this sweet forest, from the golden close Of evening, till the star of dawn may fail, Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere And every beast stretched in its rugged cave, Which is its cradle-ever from below Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far, Of one serene and unapproachèd star, Itself how low, how high beyond all height Was awed into delight, and by the charm Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion Out of their dreams; harmony became love And so this man returned with axe and saw Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green With jagged leaves,—and from the forest tops |