The New Day: Sonnets By Thomas Gordon Hake: With a Portrait of the Author by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Edited, with a Preface, by W. Earl Hodgson |
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 | The New Day: Sonnets |  |
55
LV.
[And what is poetry but Nature's song]
And what is poetry but Nature's song,Now loud as in a storm's sublimity,
Now silent where the old-faced fishes throng
Beneath the peerless crystal of the sea?
Ocean, the world's mysterious parasite,
More strange than air with its wing-flashing deep,
What creatures gambol in the watery light;
Yet noiseless all as in the calm of sleep!
The fairy forms above the spray are leaping,
They dive, they onward swim with fins unfurled.
These are her voices; these, her silence keeping,
Appear to move in concert round the world.
Then dolphin shoals proclaim the day as done,
With all the splendours of a setting sun.
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