SILENCE.— Here on a rock in blue mid-air nine thousand feet, The whole encircling sky flooded with light—the sun an unfaceable point in the dazzling zenith, Warm, windless, basking—the snow at our feet a million bright points glittering; And far around a multitudinous sea of peaks, Frozen, of rock and ice, and fields of rounded whiteness, And jutting shoulders, and slopes of shale, and walls, Behind each other rising: All drenched, dissolved, in light, And waiting, silent, rapt, as if to break into song. But not a sound. Buried in invisible valleys—'mid pine and larcn and torrent-beds below— Villages ply their daily round of labor; The peasant hacks deep the soil around his vine-roots, or with his long pole beats the boughs of olive; Far by the sea, mid garden-terraces, hotels and villas, the great town keeps its carnival of Easter— Unseen, unthought-of, here. Here only rests the stillness of the Earth, waiting upon the glory of the Sun; or here and there in some calm lakelet imaged. Ages fly by, and almost without change; dim lines of floating cloud just fringe the horizon; vistas of far lands, distant times, unfold; And the silence of centuries holds the secret of history Lost in the light of heaven. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND: 2 by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS DAYS OF THE MONTH by MOTHER GOOSE POLITICAL GREATNESS by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY KNOWLEDGE by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH THE MISTAKE by HARRY RANDOLPH BLYTHE FOOTNOTE TO TENNYSON by GERALD WILLIAM BULLETT |