With a full house of other folks
I pass the night at Sevenoaks;
And, for the air is still outside,
Push the new-painted lattice wide
Where night’s blue decent quilt is drawn
Over the shrubs and tennis-lawn
Up to the very star-lit face
Of the dim unacquainted place.
A yellow street-lamp, hid to me,
Haloes a dusky-headed tree,
And, by a hedge-row screened from sight,
Paves the still road with tranquil light,
Save where the path gold-parapetted
Lies by a shade of leaves o’erfretted;
Leaves dangle dark above the fence,
Their shadowy forms sole evidence
Of their sweet-breath’d nocturnal sleeping
And leaves out-face the light which leaping
A war with monstrous gloom to wage
Spangles a den of foliage.
A second lamp that burns in sight
Fronts shops fast closèd for the night
Whose white façades are all as mild
As eye-lids of a sleeping child
Which in their mute mendacity
The bustle of the day belie.
Among the darkling trees set back,
With many a swarthy chimney-stack,
The great, rich houses of the place
Lie all unlit, while the slow pace
Of night goes on and still lets be
Their dark inert felicity.
Here is all still, save when again
The shuddering cries of the hid train,
Deep in the cutting no one sees,
Muffled below the heavy trees,
Waken the sleeping shrubberies;
And, with red speed and scudding spark,
Disperse the arboreal-scented dark.
Were’t not for these, there is no doubt
But some fair daemon long cast out
(The authentic goddess of the place
Who far too long hath screened her face
And beauty in some beechen bole
Gigantic in the woods of Knole)
Would choose this night for her returning,
The lawns with silent footfall spurning;
And such mis-shapen woodland gods
As work-men with their laden hods
Scattered, when Progress came with Pride
And bound in brick the country-side
And Sevenoaks was edified.
To-night the wan demesne out-spread
By star-light waits her wonted tread;—
Fair! (for the dripping herb is so
Fragrant and dark) forget to know
That the dim grass, your sweet resort,
Is branded for a tennis-court,
Where silent conies scrambled through
The grey-clumped fox-gloves drenched with dew
In the old days so dear to you.
O pardon and forget it all,
The long insulting interval,
Know all a dream, believe them gone,
The urban race, nor having done
Hurt to your oaks nor stained your streams;
So stay, until the windy gleams
Of dawn the occult sweet minstrels wake.
Then through the gloaming by-ways take
Your way bent-headed whence you stole
Last night, the covert ferns of Knole,
Ere the first yawning maid unbars
The door and drives away the stars;
Lest haply from the northern sky
Smite on your ear the long-drawn sigh
(There where the silence was most deep)
Of London turning in her sleep.
“A PURPOSE OF AMENDMENT”
He who a mangold-patch doth hoe,
Sweating beneath a sturdy sun,
Clearing each weed-disguisèd row
Till day-light and the task be done,
Standeth to view his labour’s scene—
Where now, within the hedge-row’s girth,
The little plants untrammelled green
Stripes the brown fabric of the earth.
So when the absolution’s said
Behind the grille, and I may go,
And all the flowers of sin are dead,
And all the stems of sin laid low,
And I am come to Mary’s shrine
To lay my hopes within her hand—
Ah, in how fair and green a line
The seedling resolutions stand.