Explore "A Thrush Before Dawn" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A voice peals in this end of night
A phrase of notes resembling stars,
Single and spiritual notes of light.
What call they at my window-bars?
The South, the past, the day to be,
An ancient infelicity.
Darkling, deliberate, what sings
This wonderful one, alone, at peace?
What wilder things than song, what things / Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece, / Dearer than Italy, untold / Delight, and freshness centuries old?
And first first-loves, a multitude, / The exaltation of their pain; / Ancestral childhood long renewed; / And midnights of invisible rain; / And gardens, gardens, night and day, / Gardens and childhood all the way.
What Middle Ages passionate, / O passionless voice! What distant bells / Lodged in the hills, what palace state / Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells, / Without desire, without dismay, / Some morrow and some yesterday.
All-natural things! But more -- Whence came / This yet remoter mystery? / How do these starry notes proclaim / A graver still divinity? / This hope, this sanctity of fear? / "O innocent throat! O human ear!"