Classic Poem

i

Last night my window played with one moonbeam,
And I lay watching till sleep came, and stole
Over my eyelids, and she brought a shoal
Of hurrying thoughts that were her troubled team,
And in the weary ending of a dream
I found this word upon a candid scroll:
" The nightingale is like a poet's soul,
She finds fierce pain in miseries that seem. "

Ah me, methought, that she should so devise!
To seek for pain and sing such doleful bars,
That the wood aches and simple flowers cry,
And sea-green tears drench mortal lovers' eyes,
She that is made the lure of those young stars
That hang like golden spiders in the sky.

ii

That she should so devise, to find such lore
Of sighful song and piteous psalmody,
While Joy runs on through summer greenery,
And all Delight is like an open door.

Must then her liquid notes for evermore
Repeat the colour of sad things, and be
Distilled like cassia drops of agony,
From the slow anguish of a heart's bruised core?
Nay, she weeps not because she knows sad songs,
But sings because she weeps; for wilful food
Of her sad singing, she will still decoy
The sweetness that to happy things belongs.
All night with artful woe she holds the wood.
And all the summer day with natural joy.

iii

My soul is like a silent nightingale
Devising sorrow in a summer night.
Closed eyes in blazing noon put out the light,
And Hell lies in the thickness of a veil.
In every voiceless moment sleeps a wail,
And all the lonely darknesses are bright,
And every dawning of the day is white
With shapes of sorrow fugitive and frail.

My soul is like a flower whose honey-bees
Are pains that sting and suck the sweets untold,
My soul is like an instrument of strings;
I must stretch these to capture harmonies,
And to find songs like buried dust of gold,
Delve with the nightingale for sorrowful things.