Charles Hamilton Sorley (Чарльз Сорли)

Return

Still stand the downs so wise and wide?
⁠     Still shake the trees their tresses grey?
I thought their beauty might have died
⁠     Since I had been away.

I might have known the things I love,
     ⁠The winds, the flocking birds' full cry,
The trees that toss, the downs that move,
     ⁠Were longer things than I.

Lo, earth that bows before the wind,
⁠     With wild green children overgrown,
And all her bosoms, many-whinned,
⁠     Receive me as their own.

The birds are hushed and fled: the cows
     ⁠Have ceased at last to make long moan.
They only think to browse and browse
⁠     Until the night is grown.

The wind is stiller than it was,
⁠     And dumbness holds the closing day.
The earth says not a word, because
     ⁠It has no word to say.

The dear soft grasses under foot
     ⁠Are silent to the listening ear.
Yet beauty never can be mute,
     ⁠And some will always hear. 

18 September 1913

Charles Hamilton Sorley’s other poems:

  1. The Seekers
  2. To Poets
  3. Richard Jefferies
  4. J. B.
  5. Brand

Poems of other poets with the same name (Стихотворения других поэтов с таким же названием):

  • Ina Coolbrith (Ина Кулбрит) Return (“I had been dead so many years”)




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