Eleanor Farjeon (Элинор Фарджон)
The World’s Amazing Beauty
The world’s amazing beauty would make us cry Aloud; but something in it strikes us dumb. Beech-forests drenched in sunny floods Where shaking rays and shadows hum, The unrepeated aspects of the sky, Clouds in their lightest and their wildest moods, Bare shapes of hills, June grass in flower, The sea in every hour, Slopes that one January morning flow Unbrokenly with snow, Peaks piercing heaven with motions sharp and harsh, Slow-moving flats, grey reed and silver marsh, A flock of swans in flight Or solitary heron flapping home, Orchards of pear and cherry turning white, Low apple-trees with rosy-budded boughs, Streams where young willows drink and cows, Earth’s rich ploughed loam Thinking darkly forward to her sheaves, Water in Autumn spotted with yellow leaves, Light running overland, Gulls standing still above their images On strips of shining sand While evening in a haze of green Half-hides The calm receding tides-- What in the beauty we have seen in these Keeps us still silent? something we have not seen?
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