The Nightingale Near the House -- Harold Monro

(Poem #1822) The Nightingale Near the House Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn It listens, listens, Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground While all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are the bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In the moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white Then like a mist on fields of paradise Now is a raging fire, then it is like ice Then breaks and it is dawn. -- Harold Monro

Every now and then, I read a poem where all I can think, at the end, is that
the poet *really* should have quit while he was ahead. Today's poem sadly
falls into that category - the first verse is absolutely beautiful, the
second merely okay, and the final two are (despite some nice images) just
plain weak.

So why am I even bothering to run this? Well, as I have observed before, a
good enough segment - indeed, sometimes even a good enough line - can be
worth reading an otherwise mediocre poem for, and I think the first verse of
today's poem definitely qualifies. Indeed, it would have been an excellent
poem in its own right - consider:

   Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn
   It listens, listens, Taller trees beyond
   Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond
   Stares. And you sing, you sing.

Lovely, isn't it? Well, consider that your poem for today, and feel free to
ignore the rest. I certainly did.

martin

[Links]

Wikipedia page:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Monro

We've run a couple of Monro's poems before, including the delightful
"Overheard on a Salmarsh":
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/594.html