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.
