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Day and Night

Summer Daybreak

page 52

Summer Daybreak

Words are too dense, too dull, too blundering,
Pigments too turbid; yet it must be limned
This scene, it must be hymned, this hour;
I am constrained to join the waking choir,
To ease mine eyes of their acknowledgement.

Now, before sunrise, the sky is a great pearl
Of bluey sheen, but eastward flushed with fire,
With forecast fire; no starry dart impales,
This soft suffusion, nor pallid moon
Flecks the sheer candour of this crepuscule.

Above the plain wan cerements of mist
Lie, curtaining from unknowing world
The rites of dawn, and low beneath this pall
The city watch-lights, paling, glisten,
Points of fine gold in argent undertone.

In the near shade of tenebrous trees not green
As yet for dimness, numerous unseen presences
Essay, subdued, sotto voce, tentatively,
Their tiny phrases, with miniature flute twittering
Of imminent mysteries, opening to us, but not yet.

“Daybreak!” the tenuous bugling ventures,
“Wake! wake! Joy! joy! Not yet! Very quiet, very quiet!”
Drop, drop, sweet notes, upon the attendant silence,
Into a heart advised, alert, accorded,
Waiting the eternal edict: Let there be light!

page 53

(Will it be thus, thus, that quickening dawn?
so still, so tearless, so composed, so gentle;
will clinging dreams linger awhile like mist?
some timeous candles glimmer, unextinguished?
will native and colloquial notes prevent
with gradual song the peerless jubilation?
tincture of immortality be meted
in mercy, drop by drop? lustration measured
of these poor orbs, lest instant vision dazzle?
and will the scene, unveiled, appear like this,
loved and long-known, and beautiful, and new?)