Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. EASTER DAY ON MT. MOUNIER, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. EASTER DAY ON MT. MOUNIER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Silence
Last Line: Lost in the light of heaven.
Subject(s): Easter; Holidays; The Resurrection


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.





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