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Home  »  The Oxford Book of English Verse  »  845. Revelation

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

Edmund Gosse. b. 1849

845. Revelation

    INTO the silver night 
      She brought with her pale hand 
    The topaz lanthorn-light, 
  And darted splendour o’er the land; 
      Around her in a band,         5
Ringstraked and pied, the great soft moths came flying, 
  And flapping with their mad wings, fann’d 
The flickering flame, ascending, falling, dying. 
 
    Behind the thorny pink 
      Close wall of blossom’d may,  10
    I gazed thro’ one green chink 
  And saw no more than thousands may,— 
      Saw sweetness, tender and gay,— 
Saw full rose lips as rounded as the cherry, 
  Saw braided locks more dark than bay,  15
And flashing eyes decorous, pure, and merry. 
 
    With food for furry friends 
      She pass’d, her lamp and she, 
    Till eaves and gable-ends 
  Hid all that saffron sheen from me:  20
      Around my rosy tree 
Once more the silver-starry night was shining, 
  With depths of heaven, dewy and free, 
And crystals of a carven moon declining. 
 
    Alas! for him who dwells  25
      In frigid air of thought, 
    When warmer light dispels 
  The frozen calm his spirit sought; 
      By life too lately taught 
He sees the ecstatic Human from him stealing;  30
  Reels from the joy experience brought, 
And dares not clutch what Love was half revealing.