Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ON A FLIGHT OF LADY-BIRDS, by LEWIS MORRIS (1833-1907)


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ON A FLIGHT OF LADY-BIRDS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Over the summer sea
Last Line: And we cannot answer a word.
Subject(s): Birds; Faith; Belief; Creed


OVER the summer sea,
Floating on delicate wings,
Comes an unnumbered host
Of beautiful fragile things;
Whence they have come, or what
Blind impulse has forced them here,
What still voice marshalled them out
Over wide seas without fear,
You cannot tell, nor I.

But to-day the air is thick
With these strangers from far away:
On hot piers and drifting ships
The weary travellers stay.
On the sands where to-night they will drown,
On the busy waterside street,
Trampled in myriads down
By the careless wayfarers' feet
The beautiful creatures lie.

Who knows what myriads have sunk
To drown in the oily waves,
Till all our sea-side world shows
Like a graveyard crowded with graves?
Humble creatures and small,
How shall the Will which sways
This enormous unresting ball,
Through endless cycles of days,
Take thought for them or care?

And yet, if the greatest of kings,
With the wisest of sages combined,
Never could both devise --
Strong arm and inventive mind --
So wondrous a shining coat,
Such delicate wings and free,
As have these small creatures which float
Over the breathless sea
On this summer morning so fair.

* * * *

And the life, the wonderful life,
Which not all the wisdom of earth
Can give to the humblest creature that moves
The mystical process of birth --
The nameless principle which doth lurk
Far away beyond atom, or monad, or cell,
And is truly His own most marvellous work --
Was it good to give it, or, given, well
To squander it thus away?

For surely a man might think
So precious a gift and grand --
God's essence in part -- should be meted out
With a thrifty and grudging hand.
And hard by, on the yellowing corn,
Myriads of tiny jaws
Are bringing the husbandman's labour to scorn,
And the cankerworm frets and gnaws,
Which was made for these for a prey.

For a prey for these? but, oh!
Who shall read us the riddle of life --
The prodigal waste, which naught can redress
But a cycle of sorrow and strife,
The continual sequence of pain,
The perpetual triumph of wrong,
The whole creation in travail to make
A victory for the strong,
And not with frail insects alone?

For is not the scheme worked out
Among us who are raised so high?
Are there no wasted minds among men --
No hearts that aspire and sigh
For the hopes which the years steal away,
For the labour they love, and its meed of fame,
And feel the bright blade grow rusted within,
Or are born to inherited shame,
And a portion with those that groan?

How are we fettered and caged
Within our dark prison-house here!
We are made to look for a loving plan;
We find everywhere sorrow and fear.
We look for the triumph of Good;
And, from all the wide world around,
The lives that are spent cry upward to heaven,
From the slaughter-house of the ground,
Till we feel that Evil is lord.

And yet are we bound to believe,
Because all our nature is so,
In a Ruler touched by an infinite ruth
For all His creatures below.
Bound, though a mocking fiend point
To the waste, and ruin, and pain --
Bound, though our souls should be bowed in despair --
Bound, though wrong triumph again and again,
And we cannot answer a word.





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