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...ONE WAY OF LOVE by ROBERT BROWNING THE CASTAWAY by WILLIAM COWPER MILK FOR THE CAT by HAROLD MONRO VALENTINES TO MY MOTHER: 1883 by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI AN OLD WOMAN: 1 by EDITH SITWELL NEAR DOVER, SEPTEMBER 1802 by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH |