John Swinnerton Phillimore (1873–1926)

THIS is the place

Where far from the unholy populace

The daughter of Philosophy and Sleep

Her court doth keep,

Sweet Contemplation. To her service bound

Hover around

The little amiable summer airs,

Her courtiers.

The deep black soil

Makes mute her palace-floors with thick trefoil;

The grasses sagely nodding overhead

Curtain her bed;

And lest the feet of strangers overpass

Her walls of grass,

Gravely a little river goes his rounds

To beat the bounds.

—No bustling flood

To make a tumult in her neighbourhood,

But such a stream as knows to go and come

Discreetly dumb.

Therein are chambers tapestried with weeds

And screen’d with reeds;

For roof the waterlily-leaves serene

Spread tiles of green.

The sun’s large eye

Falls soberly upon me where I lie;

For delicate webs of immaterial haze

Refine his rays.

The air is full of music none knows what,

Or half-forgot;

The living echo of dead voices fills

The unseen hills.

I hear the song

Of cuckoo answering cuckoo all day long;

And know not if it be my inward sprite

For my delight

Making remember’d poetry appear

As sound in the ear:

Like a salt savour poignant in the breeze

From distant seas.

Dreams without sleep,

And sleep too clear for dreaming and too deep;

And Quiet very large and manifold

About me roll’d;

Satiety, that momentary flower,

Stretch’d to an hour:

These are her gifts which all mankind may use,

And all refuse.

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD