A Summer Night / Matthew Arnold

A Summer Night

        In the deserted, moon-blanch'd street,
How lonely rings the echo of my feet!
Those windows which I gaze at, frown,
Silent and white, unopening down,
Repellent as the world: – but see!
A break between the housetops shows
The moon, and, lost behind her, fading dim
Into the dewy dark obscurity
Down at the far horizon's rim,
    Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose.

        And to my mind the thought
Is on a sudden brought
Of a past night, and a far different scene.
Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep
As clearly as at noon;
The spring-tide's brimming flow
Heaved dazzlingly between;
Houses, with long white sweep,
Girdled the glistening bay;
Behind, through the soft air,
The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.
    That night was far more fair;
But the same restless pacings to and fro,
And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,
And the same bright, calm moon.

        And the calm moonlight seems to say –
Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast
Which neither deadens into rest
Nor ever feels the fiery glow
That whirls the spirit from itself away,
But fluctuates to and fro
Never by passion quite posses'd
And never quite benumb'd by the world's sway?  –
And I, I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield and be
Like all the other men I see.

        For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

        And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
    Awhile he holds some false way, undebarr'd
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves,
And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale Master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
    And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

        Is there no life, but these alone? 

Madman or slave must man be one?

        Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!
Clearness divine!
Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign
Of languor, though so calm, and, though so great
Are yet untroubled and unpassionate:
Who though so noble share in the world's toil,
And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil:
I will not say that your mild deeps retain
A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain
Who have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain;
But I will rather say that you remain
A world above man's head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul's horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency.
How it were good to abide there, and breathe free;
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still.

~~
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), 1852
from Poems: Second series, 1853

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

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