Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SILENCE, by THOMAS STURGE MOORE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SILENCE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: No word, no lie, can cross a carven lip
Last Line: He thenceforth will disdain the uttered word.
Alternate Author Name(s): Moore, T. Sturge
Subject(s): Silence


No word, no lie, can cross a carven lip;
No thought is quick behind a chiselled brow;
Speech is the cruel flaw in comradeship,
Whose self-bemusing ease daunts like a blow
Though unintended, irrevocable!
For wound, a mere quip dealt, no salve is found
Though poet be bled dry of words to tell
Why it was pointed! how it captured sound!

Charmed by mere phrases, we first glean their sense
When we behold our Helen streaming tears.
Give me dry eyes whose gaze but looks intense!
The dimpled lobes of unreceptive ears!
A statue not a heart! Silence so kind,
It answers love with beauty cleansed of mind.

O where is Silence more alive than dead?
Not where space mutes a myriad furnace suns;
Where time will soon know noise or knew it once,
Corpse-like, she lies on rock-or ocean-bed...
Yet as the tender-footed Dawn has sped
From east to west, inaudibly she runs
And, while the bird's insensate hymn she shuns,
Yet lark-like climbs within the ecstatic head.

Thought yearns, and hopes, surpassed, just watch her rise;
While vision's vault distends the aerial dome,
The cage of dreams becomes a permanent home
To house heart's whole content. Then eloquent eyes
Sing silence, which, if gazing, one have heard,
He thenceforth will disdain the uttered word.





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