Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ONE NIGHT, by JOHN FREEMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ONE NIGHT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I cannot see. Gone now is all that brightness
Last Line: Calls, and each silence deeper sounds for song that was.
Subject(s): Night; Sleep; Bedtime


I CANNOT see. Gone now is all that brightness
That was the moon between unclouding leaves.
Among wet boughs I wander as one sightless,
A breathing, moving tree
That of the nightly dew his life receives.
Eyes might no sharper beauty bring to me
Than smell, touch, hearing leaf'd with sudden energy.

It is the earth I snuff, the rooted trees
Breathing as I breathe now at every cell:
The earth I hear, sleep-moving in slow ease
After the long, long day:
The earth I touch, when the brush'd brambles spill
Their dews, and the wet leaves of elder spray,
Beam, briony, hawthorn snare me on my undirected way.

Eyes might no brighter beauty than this gloom
Bring to the burning mind—the burning mind
That lights even time's sickness with its bloom.
Here in this wood of night,
Where sleep and waking change as a soft wind
Falling and rising, here the dark is bright,
And leaves and dews and blossoms stream with inward light.

Is it that sharper senses now are mine,
Or is it earth and dew and green are sweeter,
And the unsteady wind more distant-fine
With the primal air?
Are all these no more than the shadowy matter
That dreams make play with, and no substance bear
More than the drifted smoke that, thinning, is seen nowhere?

It cannot be that these are less than I.
Sweet, sweet, sweet is the green smell of the grass—
Not my love's hair smells sweeter, nor her eye
Purer than the unseen dew.
Cold, cold as dawn the rustling as I pass
Of heavy branches, cold and sweet; and through
The branches sound wild voices, soft airs old and new.

In this bright dark I stray. And halted now,
My hand on the mossed body of a tree
Shedding her weightless dews from every bough
Upon the dense-leaved ground,
I too sway when the wind draws over me
Soft-moving fingers; I too am earth-bound
By sudden running roots with the tree's roots enwound.

And the tree quivers while my hand's at rest,
Quivers because the wind is whispering her,
Pressing a little, sinking upon her breast, And now falling asleep;
Quivering because my spirit it was did stir,
And not the wind, my branches now that sweep
Her branches, and my thoughts that into her thought creep.

I do not know what far-drawn airs divine,
Late-muted, through the wood's notes now are breaking;
What angel, from an undreamed sky, within
The darkness of the leaves
The long earth trance from her pure spirit is shaking.
An inward quickening in the branches heaves,
And of that fitful stir a solemn music weaves.

It draws through all her boughs and droops and lifts
While darkness like a bird shakes in his nest,
Then sleeps; and wild or grave the music drifts
Distant, and once more nears
And dewlike falls on the heart's long unrest.
So with that music sleep all wanton fears
And thoughts perverse and pain of unforgotten years. ...

Calm in the music that is earth's, yet more
Than earth unstarred by heavenly light may breathe.
No lovely uncontenting earthly shore
Such music knows, to break
Tranc'd numbness and foreshadowings of death;
Even this tree might not with such airs shake
Save in its bosom'd shade the heavenly singer wake.

Ends the calm thus?—The song ends, the tree quivers,
Her breast shrinks from my hand, and my hand falls.
In a harsh air the branches shake their rivers
Coldly upon the grass.
But still one night-bird to another calls
Between long silences while dark hours pass—
Calls, and each silence deeper sounds for song that was.





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