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Christina Georgina Rossetti - Twilight Calm
Work rating: Medium

Oh, pleasant eventide! 
Clouds on the western side 
Grow grey and greyer, hiding the warm sun: 
The bees and birds, their happy labours done, 
Seek their close nests and bide. 


Screened in the leafy wood 
The stock-doves sit and brood: 
The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough 
But lazily; pauses; and settles now 
Where once he stored his food. 


One by one the flowers close, 
Lily and dewy rose 
Shutting their tender petals from the moon: 
The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon 
Are still the noisy crows. 


The dormouse squats and eats 
Choice little dainty bits 
Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime 
Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time 
And listens where he sits. 


From far the lowings come 
Of cattle driven home: 
From farther still the wind brings fitfully 
The vast continual murmur of the sea, 
Now loud, now almost dumb. 


The gnats whirl in the air, 
The evening gnats; and there 
The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail 
For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail 
Comes forth, clammy and bare. 


Hark! that`s the nightingale, 
Telling the selfsame tale 
Her song told when this ancient earth was young: 
So echoes answered when her song was sung 
In the first wooded vale. 


We call it love and pain 
The passion of her strain; 
And yet we little understand or know: 
Why should it not be rather joy that so 
Throbs in each throbbing vein? 


In separate herds the deer 
Lie; here the bucks, and here 
The does, and by its mother sleeps the fawn: 
Through all the hours of night until the dawn 
They sleep, forgetting fear. 


The hare sleeps where it lies, 
With wary half-closed eyes; 
The cock has ceased to crow, the hen to cluck: 
Only the fox is out, some heedless duck 
Or chicken to surprise. 


Remote, each single star 
Comes out, till there they are 
All shining brightly: how the dews fall damp! 
While close at hand the glow-worm lights her lamp, 
Or twinkles from afar. 


But evening now is done 
As much as if the sun 
Day-giving had arisen in the East: 
For night has come; and the great calm has ceased, 
The quiet sands have run.
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