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. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SONNET TO HIS FRIEND R.L. IN PRAISE OF MUSIQUE AND POETRIE by RICHARD BARNFIELD GLORY OF WOMEN by SIEGFRIED SASSOON FRIENDSHIP; A SONNET by ALFRED TENNYSON QUATRAIN: SPENDTHRIFT by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH THE ECLOGUE by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |