AFTER SUNSET

To leave us so, such riches to annul

Makes passion peace and hovels beautiful.

Such vast surrender, sainthood of the skies

Pledges the eternal unto dying eyes.

Now daylight lies where falling roses fall,

Where music is when gone the singers all,

Where childhood is whose autumn whispereth

Maturity’s slow paraphrase of death.

The dim fields melt as water is, a lake

Whose shoreless blue and voiceless levels take

The first young stars for lovers; one late bird

Crystals the beauteous marriage to a word.

The woods knee deep in mist wait awed and still

The fall of that great rose and daffodil

Leaning to westward. Cities far away

Are glad of the gold star that follows day.

But here her candle in such silence bums

As thought bums in when darkling it discerns

Long gradual truth, with such deep joy thereat

The mind is all unsung magnifIcat.

There are no other silences like this;

It listens at the world’s unlimned abyss

And hears, as worship hears, the signal ring

Of God self-given in a wayside thing.

It is the dark of vision, the dim panes

Whereon the everlasting beauty rains.

And we, within, must wait, how long, to see

In life’s great sky what holier hues there be.

Ten million evenings were as this, withheld

From all glad knowing what their grace revealed.

Since love to loveliness ran ever, thus

Has God disclosed His lover’s way with us?

Who only of all creatures worship, cry

Yea and Amen, ere yet we mutely die,

Before the lovely, and, scarce knowing aught,

Fare through our twilit truth into His thought.