Classic and Contemporary Poetry
SUMMER DAWN, by CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH Poet's Biography First Line: Some summer mornings - when you've taken tea Last Line: Has opened. Let the bards of old go rest. Subject(s): Animals; Morning; Night; Poetry & Poets; Summer; Bedtime | ||||||||
SOME summer mornings -- when you've taken tea Too late the night before -- perhaps you'll see, If at some Berkshire farmhouse far away You chance to wake while yet the sky is gray, A glory, to your landscape-painter men Unknown, yet worthy of a poet's pen. Look from your window. Long gray banks of cloud The fields, the hills, the distant view enshroud. Faint stars still glimmer in the heavens above. Below dim shapes of fog o'er stream and grove Hang wreathing, shifting in the sluggish breeze. Are yonder shadows mist or mist-clad trees? For what is cloud and what is land no eye (Sleepy at least like yours) can yet descry. And now the rushing streams, by day unheard, You hear, and now the twitter of a bird, And now another, till at last the hills And woods are all alive with fugues and trills. The sheep begin to bleat, the cows to low; Three hoarse, young roosters try their best to crow, Responding to some thirsty, quacking duck, Or hen who folds her chicks with motherly cluck. Now morning spreads apace. The stars are drowned. Trees loom above the fog; and all around The landscape is transfigured in the light Of pearly skies. Westward the wings of Night Are folded as she steals unseen away. Now in the far northeast an amber gray Gleams under bars of long dark-pencilled cloud. The crows above the woods are cawing loud. Brighter and brighter up the dewy slope The coming sunrise floods the lands with hope. The clouds from north to south begin to blush. Old Graylock answers with a rosy flush. One mountain peak looms up with crimsoned sides; A moment more, and in the mist it hides. And now the valleys catch the sun below, And elms and barn-rods redden in the glow. O for a pencil rapid as the light To paint the glories bursting on the sight! Making the plain New England landscape seem The unfamiliar scenery of a dream. For this might be in Arcady -- my rhyme Some Eastern shepherd's of the olden time. Here might I pipe with Tityrus in the grove; Here to fair Amaryllis whisper love; Here the wild woodland haunts of Dryads seek -- But what is that! The locomotive's shriek Calls me from Dreamland and the Arcadian dawn. The sun is up. The mystery is gone. Another book of poesy the West Has opened. Let the bards of old go rest. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE BREATH OF NIGHT by RANDALL JARRELL HOODED NIGHT by ROBINSON JEFFERS NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP by ROBINSON JEFFERS WORKING OUTSIDE AT NIGHT by DENIS JOHNSON POEM TO TAKE BACK THE NIGHT by JUNE JORDAN COOL DARK ODE by DONALD JUSTICE POEM TO BE READ AT 3 A.M by DONALD JUSTICE ROUND ABOUT MIDNIGHT by BOB KAUFMAN CORRESPONDENCES; HEXAMETERS AND PENTAMETERS by CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH |
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