Twilight Calm

Illustration by Florence Harrison

Twilight Calm

a poem by Christina Rossetti

Oh pleasant eventide!

Clouds on the western side

Grow gray and grayer hiding the warm sun:

The bees and birds, their happy labour done.

Seek their close nests and bide.

Screened in the leafy wood

The stock -doves sit and brood:

The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough

But lazily; pauses; and settles now

Where once he stored his food.

One by one the flowers close,

Lily and dewy rose

Shutting their tender petals from the moon:

The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon

Are still the noisy crows.

The dormouse sqats and eats

Choice little dainty bits

Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime;

Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time

And listens where he sits.

From far the lowings come

Of cattle driven home:

From farther still the wind brings fitfully

The vast continual murmur of he sea,

Now loud, now almost dumb.

The gnats whirl in the air,

The evening gnats; and there

The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail

For prey; the bat wakes; the shell-less snail

Comes forth clammy and bare.

Hark! that's the nightingale,

Telling the self-same 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 rather not be 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 the night until the dawn

They sleep, forgetting fear.

The hare sleeps where it lies,

With wary half-closed eyes;

The cock has ceased to crow, the hen to cluck:

Only the fox is out, some heedless duck

Or chicken to surprise.

Remote, each single star

Comes out, till there they are

All shining brightly. How the dews fall damp!

While close at hand the glow-worm lights her lamp,

Or twinkles from afar.

But evening now is done

As much as if the sun

Day-giving had arisen in the East:

For night has come; and the great calm has ceased,

The quiet sands have run.

Christina Rossetti was an unmarried Victorian poet - sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Suffering from bouts of depression and devoutly religious, she focused her writing on devotional and children's poetry. Born Dec 1830 - died aged 64 in December 1894.