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Night Rhapsody

How beautiful it is to wake at night,    When over all there reigns the ultimate spell    Of complete silence, darkness absolute,    To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree,    In slow gyration, with no sensible sound,    Unless to ears of unimagined beings,    Resident incorporeal or stretched    In vigilance of ecstasy among    Ethereal paths and the celestial maze.    The rumour of our onward course now brings    A steady rustle, as of some strange ship    Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled    By volume of an ever-constant air,    At fullest night, through seas for ever calm,    Swept lovely and unknown for ever on.    How beautiful it is to wake at night,    Embalmed in darkness watchful, sweet, and still,    As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim    Of currents circumvolvent in the void,    To lie quite still and to become aware    Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies    On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge,    So, isolate from the friendly company    Of the huge universe which turns without,    To brood apart in calm and joy awhile    Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows    Whether self is, or if self only is,    For ever....    How beautiful to wake at night,    Within the room grown strange, and still, and sweet,    And live a century while in the dark    The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns;    To watch the window open on the night,    A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,    And, lying thus, to feel dilate within    The press, the conflict, and the heavy pulse    Of incommunicable sad ecstasy,    Growing until the body seems outstretched    In perfect crucifixion on the arms    Of a cross pointing from last void to void,    While the heart dies to a mere midway spark.    All happiness thou holdest, happy night,    For such as lie awake and feel dissolved    The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool    Breath hither blown from the ethereal flowers    That mist thy fields!

O happy, happy wounds,    Conditioned by existence in humanity,    That have such powers to heal them! slow sweet sighs    Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth    Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes,    Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes    Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.    How beautiful it is to wake at night,    Another night, in darkness yet more still,    Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,    Filled rather by the perfume's wandering flood    Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,    Shall from the furthest utter silences    In glimmering secrecy have gathered up    An host of whisperings and scattered sighs,    To loose at last a sound as of the plunge    And lapsing seethe of some Pacific wave,    Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,    Rolls in to wreathe with circling foam away    The flutter of the golden moths that haunt    The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands.    So beautiful it is to wake at night!    Imagination, loudening with the surf    Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,    Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote    Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep,    To bear me on the summit of her wave    Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge    Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised    Above the frontiers of infinity,    To which in the full reflux of the wave    Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,    Borne to those other shores — now never mine    Save for a hovering instant, short as this    Which now sustains me ere I be drawn back —    To learn again, and wholly learn,

I trust,    How beautiful it is to wake at night.

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Robert Nichols

Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols (6 September 1893 – 17 December 1944) was an English writer, known as a war poet of the First World War, and a play…
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