Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DAWN, by WILLIAM FREELAND


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DAWN, by                    
First Line: In the cool star-glimmer, night's dream of dawn
Last Line: To bathe in the solar surge of fire!
Subject(s): Animals; Dawn; Sunrise


IN the cool star-glimmer, night's dream of dawn,
When dew-bells blink'd on leaf and lawn,
I rose ere yet the lark's keen eye
Twitch'd to the first sun-pulse in the sky.
Downward I went by a forest way,
Companionless, to an ocean bay;
And all around the stillness hung
Like silence on a prophet's tongue,
Which may not speak the thing it knows,
Till heaven's fire on the altar glows;
And I alone of human birth
Seem'd all that walk'd the soundless earth.

In the blanket of her wing the wren
Slept far within the forest's ken;
The sinless mouse in her hollow sod,
Lay safe as in the breast of God;
In her honey-golden cell the bee
Humm'd in a dream of melodie;
And other tiny pensioners lay
Under the veiling mists till day.
Nor innocent things alone, but those
That make all living else their foes,
Were caught by the opiate clouds that fall
With the shadowy eve on the eyes of all. --
The subtle snake lay coil'd at ease
By the cedar's many-cycled knees,
Acting perchance, in his curtain'd brain
The drama of paradise again;
Cheating once more, with golden lie,
The mother of all humanity.
The tiger slept in his bosky land
Dark, like an inly-smouldering brand,
Which, touch'd by the faintest breath that came,
Would leap to life like a living flame.
The eagle with talons and beak of blood,
Brooded above the plunging flood --
Fixed as from all eternity --
God of the moaning mystery.
Under the billows in caverns dark
Hung suspended the long keen shark,
Till ocean should open his blood-red eye --
To dart on the white ship sailing by.

The forest was pass'd; I reach'd the bay
Haunted by silence all the way:
The far-borne murmur of the deep
Wak'd not the sleeping land from sleep;
The music of that tremulent noise
Seem'd audible without a voice,
According sweetly with the chime
That haunts the solemn calms of time.

Low-eastward, where dim ocean flows,
Swift points of glimmering spears uprose,
And through the shadowy lanes of light
Vanish'd the fawn-like stars in fright;
But stilly the forest began to stir
With stealthy wings in oak and fir
And round about each wrinkl'd root
Whisk'd horny claw and woolly foot: --
Out of her blanket peep'd the wren
With eyes like the eyes of fairy men;
The innocent mouse on nature's quest
Crept from her maker's genial breast;
Forth from his citadel strumm'd the bee
Blowing the trump of industrie;
The tiger, at the bird's sweet note,
Woke with a blood-hound at his throat,
And shot apace with a burning mouth,
And dropp'd like a star in the sedgy south;
Out of his coils, as from an abyss,
Flash'd the old snake with a startled hiss,
And, chased by the ghost of his vision, fled
As if some heel had bruis'd his head;
A motion I saw on the motionless sea,
Rushing between the Dawn and me,
Silent and black as an upturn'd keel,
Swift as death on an edge of steel --
'Twas the shark who follow'd in hungry joy
A ship with a death-doom'd sailor boy;
The eagle, melancholy shape
Fate-like, calm, on the shadowy cape,
Oped an unfathomable eye
Full on the Dawn's grey-vizor'd sky,
Then rose on wide heroic wing,
Making the cool air quiver and sing,
And upward wheel'd through many a spire
To bathe in the solar surge of fire!





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