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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THE BIRD AT DAWN, by HAROLD MONRO Poet's Biography
First Line: What I saw was just one eye
Last Line: The singing and the silence of a bird?
Subject(s): Birds
First Line: What I saw was just one eye
Last Line: The singing and the silence of a bird?
Subject(s): Birds
What I saw was just one eye
In the dawn as I was going:
A bird can carry all the sky
In that little button glowing.
Never in my life I went
So deep into the firmament.
He was standing on a tree,
All in blossom overflowing;
And he purposely looked hard at me,
At first, as if to question merrily:
'Where are you going?'
But next some far more serious thing to say:
I could not answer, could not look away.
Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye:
Little mirror of all sky!—
And then the after-song another tree
Held, and sent radiating back on me.
If no man had invented human word,
And a bird-song had been
The only way to utter what we mean,
What would we men have heard,
What understood, what seen,
Between the trills and pauses, in between
The singing and the silence of a bird?
Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!
Other Poems of Interest...
GLIMPSES OF THE BIRDS by JOHN HOLLANDER
GLIMPSES OF THE BIRDS by JOHN HOLLANDER
AUDUBON EXAMINES A BITTERN by ANDREW HUDGINS
DISPATCHES FROM DEVEREUX SLOUGH by MARK JARMAN
A COUNTRY LIFE by RANDALL JARRELL
CANADIAN WARBLER by GALWAY KINNELL
YELLOW BIRD by KENNETH SLADE ALLING
THE CRIPPLE by KARLE WILSON BAKER
MILK FOR THE CAT by HAROLD MONRO