The Vision of Sir Launfal eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 124 pages of information about The Vision of Sir Launfal.

The Vision of Sir Launfal eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 124 pages of information about The Vision of Sir Launfal.

      No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,
    Making me poorer in my poverty,
        But mingles with my senses and my heart; 10
      My own projected spirit seems to me
        In her own reverie the world to steep;
        ’Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep,
    Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.

        How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, 15
      Clasped by the faint horizon’s languid arms,
        Each into each, the hazy distances! 
      The softened season all the landscape charms;
        Those hills, my native village that embay,
        In waves of dreamier purple roll away, 20
    And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

        Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee
      Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;
        The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
      Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves 25
        Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye
        Of Boaz as the maiden’s glow went by,
    So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

        The cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
      Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, 30
        Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
      Southward, perhaps to far Magellan’s Straits;
        Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;
        Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails, 34
    With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

        The sobered robin, hunger-silent now,
      Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;
        The squirrel, on the shingly shagbark’s bough,
      Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear,
        Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound, 40
        Whisks to his winding fastness underground;
    The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

        O’er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
      Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call
        Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; 45
      The single crow a single caw lets fall;
        And all around me every bush and tree
        Says Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be,
    Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

        The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50
      Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
        And hints at her foregone gentilities
      With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves;
        The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,
        Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 55
    As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Vision of Sir Launfal from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.