from The April Day
All day the low hung clouds have dropt
Their garnered fulness down;
All day that soft grey mist hath wrapt
Hill, valley, grove, and town.
There has not been a sound to-day
To break the calm of nature;
Nor motion, I might almost say,
Of life or living creature:
Of waving bough, or warbling bird,
Or cattle faintly lowing;
I could have half believed I heard
The leaves and blossoms growing.
I stood to hear — I love it well,
The rain's continuous sound:
Small drops, but thick and fast they fell,
Down straight into the ground.
For leafy thickness is not yet
Earth's naked breast to skreen,
Though ev'ry dripping branch is set
With shoots of tender green.
Sure since I looked, at early morn,
Those honeysuckle buds
Have swelled to double growth: that thorn
Hath put forth larger studs.
That lilac's cleaving cones have burst,
The milk-white flowers revealing;
Ev'n now upon my senses first,
Methinks their sweets are stealing:
The very earth, the steamy air,
Is all with fragrance rife!
And grace and beauty ev'ry where
Are flushing into life.
Down, down they come — those fruitful stores,
Those earth-rejoicing drops!
A momentary deluge pours,
Then thins, decreases, stops.
And ere the dimples on the stream
Have circled out of sight,
Lo! from the west, a parting gleam
Breaks forth of amber light.
It slants along that emerald mead,
Across those poplars tall,
And brightens every rain-gloss'd weed
On that old mossy wall.
The windows of that mansion old
Rekindled by the blaze,
Reflect in flames of living gold,
The concentrated rays.
But yet, behold — abrupt and loud,
Comes down the glittering rain —
The farewell of a passing cloud,
The fringes of its train.
'Tis o'er — the blackbird's glossy wing
Flirts off the sparkling spray,
As yon tall elm he mounts, to sing
His evening roundelay.
~~
Caroline Bowles Southey (1786-1854)
from The Widow's Tale, and other poems, 1822
[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]
Maciej Lewandowski, "Rainy Day in a Scottish Village," April 2004.
After finding this poem on the web and deciding to blog it, I went looking for a book source (my usual method). The only one I could find for the poem was the original 1822 edition, so I used that, altering most of the spelling and punctuation accordingly because by my reading that did not interfere with the ability to read the poem. In three places, though, I used lines from the modernized text I'd originally found, because the 200-year-old lines looked incorrect or at least confusing to the modern reader. In the 1822 text:
ReplyDeleteL5 said "There has not been a sound to day";
L37 said: ""And e'er the dimples on the stream";
L47 had a full stop rather than a comma at its end.