Twilight Calm

Oh, pleasant eventide!         Clouds on the western side     Grow grey and greyer hiding the warm sun:     The bees and birds, their happy labours done,         Seek their close nests and bide.         Screened in the leafy wood         The stock-doves sit and brood:     The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough     But lazily; pauses; and settles now         Where once he stored his food.         One by one the flowers close,         Lily and dewy rose     Shutting their tender petals from the moon:     The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon         Are still the noisy crows.         The dormouse squats and eats         Choice little dainty bits     Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime;     Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time         And listens where he sits.         From far the lowings come         Of cattle driven home:     From farther still the wind brings fitfully     The vast continual murmur of the sea,         Now loud, now almost dumb.         The gnats whirl in the air,         The evening gnats; and there     The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail     For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail         Comes forth, clammy and bare.         Hark! that's the nightingale,         Telling the selfsame tale     Her song told when this ancient earth was young:     So echoes answered when her song was sung         In the first wooded vale.         We call it love and pain         The passion of her strain;     And yet we little understand or know:     Why should it not be rather joy that so         Throbs in each throbbing vein?         In separate herds the deer         Lie; here the bucks, and here     The does, and by its mother sleeps the fawn:     Through all the hours of night until the dawn         They sleep, forgetting fear.         The hare sleeps where it lies,         With wary half-closed eyes;     The cock has ceased to crow, the hen to cluck:     Only the fox is out, some heedless duck         Or chicken to surprise.         Remote, each single star         Comes out, till there they are     All shining brightly: how the dews fall damp!     While close at hand the glow-worm lights her lamp         Or twinkles from afar.         But evening now is done         As much as if the sun     Day-giving had arisen in the East:     For night has come; and the great calm has ceased,         The quiet sands have run.