---

Robert Laurence Binyon - A Prelude At Evening
Work rating: Low

My spirit was like the lonely air
 Before night,
 Like hovering cloud that`s melted there
 In the late light,
 When slow the vast earth--shadows reach
 To the last flush,
 And the wandering silences have each
 Their own hush.

 Did the green grass about me glimmer,
 Or trees tower?
 Not softer to my sense, nor dimmer,
 The obscure power
 Of all the world`s wide trouble, fought
 In the heart`s recess:
 My heart was solitude, my thought
 Emptiness.

 But through my spirit that seemed, unfilled,
 Alone to float,
 A sudden dewy sweetness thrilled;
 A low note!
 And then a loud note, rippling full
 To a still pause:
 The liquid silence was a pool
 That a breeze flaws.

 It throbbed again, how lonely clear!
 A song that seemed
 Sprung beyond memory or fear,
 A voice dreamed
 In a land that no man ever found;
 And who knows
 What shook those lingering drops of sound
 At the rich close?

 Ah, where were you, passion and grief
 Of the world`s wrong?
 What had you to do with a trembling leaf
 And a bird`s song,
 And spaces calm with coming of night,
 And the fresh gloom
 Of shadowy trees, and smelt delight
 Of hidden bloom?

 Yet O, in me that song had part
 Because of you!
 It drank of the very blood of the heart
 It quivered through
 Because of the tears of joy, and the cost
 Of a joy`s breath,
 Measureless thoughts of a dearness lost,
 Hope, and death.

 Strangeness of longing, beauty, pain!
 I was aware
 Of all your secret, soft as rain,
 In the dim air.
 For Life it was that sang aloud
 To the lone dew,
 Brave in the night and sweet in the cloud:
 My heart knew.
Source
The script ran 0.001 seconds.