Classic Poem

Not all the wasteful beauty of the year
Heaped in the scale of one consummate hour
Shall this outweigh: the curve of quiet air
That held, as in the green sun-fluted light
Of sea-caves quivering in a tidal lull,
Those tranced towers and long unruined walls,
Moat-girdled from the world's dissolving touch,
The rook-flights lessening over evening woods,
And, down the unfrequented grassy slopes,
The shadows of old oaks contemplative
Reaching behind them like the thoughts of age.

High overhead hung the long Sussex ridge,
Sun-cinctured, as a beaker's rim of gold
Curves round its green concavity; and slow
Across the upper pastures of the sky
The clouds moved white before the herding airs
That in the hollow, by the moated walls,
Stirred not one sleeping lily from its sleep.

Deeper the hush fell; more remote the earth
Fled onward with the flight of cloud and sun,
And cities strung upon the flashing reel
Of nights and days. We knew no more of these

Than the grey towers redoubling in the moat
The image of a bygone strength transformed
To beauty's endless uses; and like them
We felt the touch of that renewing power
That turns the landmarks of man's ruined toil
To high star-haunted reservoirs of peace.
And with that sense there came the deeper sense
Of moments that, between the beats of time,
May thus insphere in some transcendent air
The plenitude of being.
Far currents feed them, from those slopes of soul
That know the rise and set of other stars
White-roaring downward through remote defiles
Dim-forested with unexplored thought;
Yet tawny from the flow of lower streams
That drink the blood of battle, sweat of earth,
And the broached vats of cities revelling.
All these the moments hold; yet these resolved
To such clear wine of beauty as shall flush
The blood to richer living. . . . Thus we mused,
And musing thus we felt the magic touch,
And such a moment held us. As, at times,
Through the long windings of each other's eyes
We have reached some secret hallowed silent place
That a god visits at the turn of night—
In such a solitude the moment held us.
And one were thought and sense in that profound
Submersion of all being deep below
The vexed waves of action. Clear we saw,
Through the clear nether stillness of the place,
The gliding images of words and looks
Swept from us down the gusty tides of time,
And here unfolding to completer life;
And like dull pebbles from a sunless shore
Plunged into crystal waters, suddenly
We took the hues of beauty, and became,
Each to the other, all that each had sought.

Thus did we feel the moment and the place
One in the heart of beauty; while far off
The rooks' last cry died on the fading air,
And the first star stood white upon the hill.