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Robert Laurence Binyon - Winter Sunrise
Work rating: Low

It is early morning within this room; without,
 Dark and damp; without and within, stillness
 Waiting for day: not a sound but a listening air.

 Yellow jasmine, delicate on stiff branches
 Stands in a Tuscan pot to delight the eye
 In spare December`s patient nakedness.

 Suddenly, softly, as if at a breath breathed
 On the pale wall, a magical apparition,
 The shadow of the jasmine, branch and blossom!

 It was not there, it is there, in a perfect image;
 And all is changed. It is like a memory lost
 Returning without a reason into the mind;

 And it seems to me that the beauty of the shadow
 Is more beautiful than the flower; a strange beauty,
 Pencilled and silently deepening to distinctness.

 As a memory stealing out of the mind`s slumber,
 A memory floating up from a dark water,
 Can be more beautiful than the thing remembered.

 I turn to the window, and out of a low cloud
 Is a brimming--over of brightness; dazzling the eye
 With levelled brilliance, fiery--fresh, the Sun.

 As in absent thought with dreaming eyes I gaze
 On sudden shadows gliding across the rime
 A vision comes before me in utter silence

 The earth is moving, the earth is rolling over
 All that is usual all that goes unquestioned
 is taken from me
 wider, wider the doors of vision are opening

 Horizon opening into unguessed horizons
 And I with the earth am moving into the light
 The earth is moving, the earth is rolling over
 into the light long, long
 shadows of trees run out
 are running across the grass.

 With frosty plains, mountains and curving coasts
 Cities and rivers, forests, burning deserts,
 Seas and the sprinkled islands, passing, passing,
 But all transparent! Under the generous earth
 The careless waters, I see the original fires
 Leaping in spasms, seeking to burst their prison
 And I remember that human eyes have seen
 Solid earth yawn and cities shaken to fragments
 Ocean torn to the bottom and great ships swallowed,

 Now more terrible than those blind convulsions
 Are men at war; on land, on the seas, in the air,
 War, war in the brain, in the obstinate will
 war in the brain, war in the will, war
 No refuge or hiding place anywhere for the mind
 And now I hear everywhere sound of battle
 The seekers after destruction, there is no refuge
 Death, death, death on the earth, in the sea, in the air
 Yet oh, it is a single soul always in the midst
 Each is a single soul.
 O it cannot be, yet it is

 Let me not be so stunned that I cannot feel . . .
 Imagination is but a little cup
 It can hold but a minim part
 Can a little cup contain an ocean?

 My dreaming eyes return
 The flower of winter remembers its own season
 And the beautiful shadow upon the pale wall
 Is imperceptibly moving with ancient earth
 Around the sun that timeless measures sure and silent.
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