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Classic and Contemporary Poetry


WHIP-POOR-WILL by LOUIS V. LEDOUX

First Line: A MOONLIT MIST THE VALLEY FILLS
Last Line: TWO WORLDS THERE ARE: BUT WHICH IS REAL?

A moonlit mist the valley fills,
Though rides unseen herself the moon;
Behind me sleep majestic hills,
Before me fragrant fields of June.

Such breathless silence fills the place
I seem to hear the night moths pass;
Soft wings have touched my hands and face,
And firefly lamps above the grass

Have lit a moment, clustered white,
The mountain laurel buds that gleam
Against the velvet depth of night
Like blooms of childhood seen in dream.

So lone am I, so far from men,
My kinship with the earth I feel;
And mystic things beyond my ken
Does sybil darkness slow reveal.

I enter through a moonlit door,
Before me fragrant silence lies;
And out beynd our human shore,
Where moaning billows fall and rise,

I pass toward headlands dim and far
That girdle with white walls of foam
A land where things eternal are
That seems the soul's remembered home.

Behind me fades the earth I knew,
Beyond the world of sense am I;
From mountains of the soul I view
The things I worshipped passing by:

Before me do they come and go
Through rhythmic changes manifold
With refluence and resurgence slow
By laws established from of old

But swift upon the silence falling
There comes a strange, familiar cry;
Persistent, iterant the calling,
And evermore without reply.

In it are life's unquenched desire
And age-old requiems of pain
Upheavals of volcanic fire,
The loneliness of midnight rain

The silence breaks in waves of sound;
The throbbing heart of life I feel.
O ye who wingless walk the ground!
Two worlds there are: But which is real?



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