Disabled Online Dating
Home
Reading Room Bible Shakespeare Short Stories Poetry Books

The High Oaks

Barking Hall, July  19th, 1896

Algernon Charles Swinburne



            Fourscore years and seven
            Light and dew from heaven
    Have fallen with dawn on these glad woods each day
            Since here was born, even here,
            A birth more bright and dear
            Than ever a younger year
    Hath seen or shall till all these pass away,
        Even all the imperious pride of these,
The woodland ways majestic now with towers of trees.

            Love itself hath nought
            Touched of tenderest thought
    With holiest hallowing of memorial grace
            For memory, blind with bliss,
            To love, to clasp, to kiss,
            So sweetly strange as this,
    The sense that here the sun first hailed her face,
        A babe at Her glad mother's breast,
And here again beholds it more beloved and blest.

            Love's own heart, a living
            Spring of strong thanksgiving,
    Can bid no strength of welling song find way
            When all the soul would seek
            One word for joy to speak,
            And even its strength makes weak
    The too strong yearning of the soul to say
        What may not be conceived or said
While darkness makes division of the quick and dead.

            Haply, where the sun
            Wanes, and death is none,
The word known here of silence only, held
            Too dear for speech to wrong,
            May leap in living song
            Forth, and the speech be strong
    As here the silence whence it yearned and welled
            From hearts whose utterance love sealed fast
Till death perchance might give it grace to live at last.

            Here we have our earth
            Yet, with all the mirth
    Of all the summers since the world began,
            All strengths of rest and strife
            And love-lit love of life
            Where death has birth to wife,
    And where the sun speaks, and is heard of man:
        Yea, half the sun's bright speech is heard,
And like the sea the soul of man gives back his word.

            Earth's enkindled heart
            Bears benignant part
    In the ardent heaven's auroral pride of prime:
            If ever home on earth
            Were found of heaven's grace worth
            So God-beloved a birth
    As here makes bright the fostering face of time,
        Here, heaven bears witness, might such grace
Fall fragrant as the dewfall on that brightening face,

            Here, for mine and me,
            All that eyes may see
     Hath more than all the wide world else of good,
            All nature else of fair:
            Here as none otherwhere
            Heaven is the circling air,
    Heaven is the homestead, heaven the wold, the wood:
        The fragrance with the shadow spread
From broadening wings of cedars breathes of dawn's bright bed.

            Once a dawn rose here
            More divine and dear,
    Rose on a birth-bed brighter far than dawn's,
            Whence all the summer grew
            Sweet as when earth was new
            And pure as Eden's dew:
    And yet its light lives on these lustrous lawns,
        Clings round these wildwood ways, and cleaves
To the aisles of shadow and sun that wind unweaves and weaves.

            Thoughts that smile and weep,
            Dreams that hallow sleep,
    Brood in the branching shadows of the trees,
            Tall trees at agelong rest
            Wherein the centuries nest,
            Whence, blest as these are blest,
    We part, and part not from delight in these;
        Whose comfort, sleeping as awake,
We bear about within us as when first it spake

            Comfort as of song
            Grown with time more strong,
    Made perfect and prophetic as the sea,
            Whose message, when it lies
            Far off our hungering eyes,
            Within us prophesies
    Of life not ours, yet ours as theirs may be
        Whose souls far off us shine and sing
As ere they sprang back sunward, swift as fire might spring.

            All this oldworld pleasance
            Hails a hallowing presence,
    And thrills with sense of more than summer near,
            And lifts toward heaven more high
            The song-surpassing cry
            Of rapture that July
    Lives, for her love who makes it loveliest here;
        For joy that she who here first drew
The breath of life she gave me breathes it here anew.

            Never birthday born
            Highest in height of morn
    Whereout the star looks forth that leads the sun
            Shone higher in love's account,
            Still seeing the mid noon mount
            From the eager dayspring's fount
    Each year more lustrous, each like all in one;
        Whose light around us and above
We could not see so lovely save by grace of love.


© COPYRIGHT 1999 - Badger.Org, Inc. - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED