Page:Goblin Market and Other Poems - C G Rossetti (1862, 1st ed).djvu/114

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
98
TWILIGHT CALM.
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;