Nature and Elements

O! swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,

 

Orpheus with his lute made trees,

 

His nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.

 

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

 

I never saw a wild thing

 

Be a good animal, true to your instincts.

 

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

 

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures,

 

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

 

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,

 

I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

 

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

 

And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on.

 

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

 

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

 

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

 

A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.

 

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark.

 

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

 

Dosn’t thou ’ear my ’erse’s legs, as they canters awaäy? Proputty, proputty, proputty—that’s what I ’ears ’em saäy.

 

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

 

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

 

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

 

Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.