Silver

by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in silver feathered sleep
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream. 

by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

by Wendell Berry (1934-present)

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water,

and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

by Herbert Trench (1865-1923)

She comes not when noon is on the roses

Too bright is day

She comes not to the soul till it reposes

From work and play

But when night is on the hills, and the great voices 

Roll in from sea

By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight

She comes to me.

by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I leant upon a coppice gate when frost was spectre-gray,
And winter's dregs made desolate the weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be the century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy, the wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among the bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through his happy good-night air
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware.

by A E Housman (1859-1936)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now, 

Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride, 

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, 

Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score, 

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom, 

Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go 

To see the cherry hung with snow.

by John Clare (1793-1864)

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.  

by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

by Gill Surgey (1952-2024 ) – aged 11

A cow lowed in the milking barn

A barn owl overhead

Flew to its hole in the rafters old 

And a cat ran into the shed.

The night wind played in the poplar trees

The moon shone in the sky

The beech trees sighed and the white owl cried

As the shadows floated by.

I went to the window above the porch

And onto the window ledge crept

The night was as keen as a night’s ever been

And the soul of the old house slept.

I tiptoed down to the old front door

And peeping through the glass

Saw by the lamp the stone path damp

And shadows on the grass.

The shadows drifted to the roof

And flew beneath the thatch

A farm dog barked and the shadows harked 

To the sound of a rattling latch.

The shadows fled into the night

And left the whispering gloom

The light was gone and the night wore on

And a dark cloud hid the moon.

by John Clare (1793-1864)

'Tweet' pipes the robin as the cat creeps by
Her nestling young that in the elderns lie,
And then the bluecap tootles in its glee,
Picking the flies from orchard apple tree,
And 'pink' the chaffinch cries its well-known strain,
Urging its kind to utter 'pink' again,
While in a quiet mood hedgesparrows try
An inward stir of shadowed melody.
Around the rotten tree the firetail mourns
As the old hedger to his toil returns,
Chopping the grain to stop the gap close by
The hole where her blue eggs in safety lie.
Of everything that stirs she dreameth wrong
And pipes her 'tweet tut' fears the whole day long.