EVENING

PONTE A MARE, PISA

THE sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the grey air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening's breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its silent dream.

There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,

Nor damp within the shadow of the trees; The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;

And in the inconstant motion of the breeze The dust and straws are driven up and down And whirled about the pavement of the town.

Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it never fades away;

You, being changed, will find it then as now.

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut
By darkest barriers of enormous cloud,
Like mountain over mountain huddled-but
Growing and moving upward in a crowd,

And over it a space of watery blue,

Which the keen evening Star is shining through.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

AUTUMN

A DIRGE

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the year

On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves

dead,

Is lying.

Come, months, come away,
From November to May

In your saddest array;
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each

gone

To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away,
Put on white, black, and grey,
Let your light sisters play-
Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

CLOCK-A-CLAY

IN the cowslip pips I lie,
Hidden from the buzzing fly,

While green grass beneath me lies,
Pearled with dew like fishes' eyes,
Here I lie, a clock-a-clay,
Waiting for the time of day.

While the forest quakes surprise,
And the wild wind sobs and sighs,
My home rocks as like to fall,
On its pillar green and tall;
When the pattering rain drives by
Clock-a-clay keeps warm and dry.

Day by day, and night by night,
All the week I hide from sight;
In the cowslip pips I lie,

In rain and dew still warm and dry;
Day and night, and night and day,
Red, black-spotted clock-a-clay.

My home shakes in wind and showers,
Pale green pillar topped with flowers,
Bending at the wild wind's breath,
Till I touch the grass beneath;
Here I live, lone clock-a-clay,
Watching for the time of day.

John Clare

THE THRUSH'S NEST

WITHIN a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill, large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns of rapture, while I drank the sound
With joy-and oft an unintruding guest,

I watched her secret toils from day to day;
How true she warped the moss to form her nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay,
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue;

And there I witnessed, in the summer hours, A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly, Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

John Clare

MARIANA

"MARIANA IN THE MOATED GRANGE"
(Measure for Measure.)

WITH blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted one and all.
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide,

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;

She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow: The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen's low