DIM through cloud vails the moonlight trembles down A cold grey vapour on the huddling town; And far from cut-throat's corner the eye sees Unsilvered hogs'-backs, pallid stubble-leas; Barn-ridges gaunt and gleamless: blue like ghosts The knoll mill and the odd cowls of the oasts, And lonely homes pondering with joys and fears The dusty travail of three hundred years. In the ashen twilight momently afield, Like thistle-wool wafting across the weald, Flickers a sighing spirit; as he passes, The lispering aspens and the scarfed brook grasses With wakened melancholy writhe the air. In the false moonlight wails my old despair, And I am but a pipe for its wild moan; Crying through the misty bypaths; slumber-banned; Impelled and voiced, to piercing coronach blown: A hounded kern in this grim No Man's Land, I am spurned between the secret countersigns Of every little grain of rustling sand In these parched lanes where the grey wind maligns; Oaks, once my friends, with ugly murmurings Madden me, and ivy whirs like condor wings: The very bat that stoops and whips askance Shrills malice at the soul grown strange in France. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...EVE SPEAKS by LOUIS UNTERMEYER FREDERICKSBURG by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH MY LOVE COULD WALK by WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES THE SPANISH FRIAR: 1-3. LOVE'S DESPAIR by JOHN DRYDEN GYPSY MAN by JAMES LANGSTON HUGHES THE DARK ANGEL by LIONEL PIGOT JOHNSON LONDON CHURCHES by RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY: THE HYMN by JOHN MILTON |