University of Virginia Library

I heard the Whitethroat sing
Last eve at twilight when the wind was dead,
And her sleek bosom and her fair smooth head
Vibrated, ruffling, and her olive wing
Trembled. So soft her song was that it seemed
As though, in wandering through the copse at noon,
She must have found the holy bough where dreamed
The day-struck Nightingale,
And, listening, must have overheard too soon
The dim rehearsal of that golden tale
That greets the laggard moon.
But through the imitative strain,
Between each gentle cadence, and again
When those clear notes she tried, for which her throat
Was not so capable as fain,
I joyed to hear her own peculiar note
Through all the music float.
But when the gentle song, that streamed away,
Like some enamoured rivulet that flows
Under a night of leaves and flowering may,
Died on the stress of its own lovely pain,
Even as it died away,
It seemed as if no influence could restrain
The notes from welling in the Whitethroat's brain;
But with the last faint chords, on fluttering wing
She rose, until she hung in sunset air;
A little way she rose, as if her care
Were all to reach the heavens, her radiant goal,
Then sank among the leaves.
Pathetic singer! with no strength to sing,
And wasted pinions far too weak to bear
The body's weight that mars the singing soul,
In wild disorder, see, her bosom heaves!
Scarcely, with quivering plumes,
She wins the sparse bough of that tulip-tree,
Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song,
Whose mystic flowers her delicate minstrelsy.
But, hark! how her rich throat resumes
Its broken music, and the garden blooms
Around her, and the flower that waited long,
The vast magnolia, rends its roseate husk,
And opens to the dusk;
Odour and song embalm the day's decline.
Ah! pulsing heart of mine,
Flattered beyond all judgment by delight,
This pleasing harmony, this gentle light,
This soft and enervating breeze of flowers,
This magic antechamber of the night
With florid tapestry of twilight hours,
Is this enough for thee?
Lo! from the summit of the tulip-tree
The enamoured Whitethroat answered ‘Yes! O yes!’
And once again, with passion and the stress
Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
Enshrined in any melody she knew,
She rose into the air;
And then, oppressed with pain too keen to bear,
Her last notes faded as she downward flew.

And she was silent. But the night came on;
A whisper rose among the giant trees,
Between their quivering topmost boughs there shone
The liquid depths of moonlight tinted air;
By slow degrees
The darkness crept upon me unaware.
The enchanted silence of the hours of dew
Fell like a mystic presence more and more,
Aweing the senses. Then I knew,
But scarcely heard, thrilled through to the brain's core,
The shrill first prelude of triumphant song,
Cleaving the twilight. Ah! we do thee wrong,
Unequalled Philomela, while thy voice
We hear not; every gentle song and clear
Seems worthy of thee to our poor noonday choice.
But when thy true fierce music, full of pain,
And wounded memory, and the tone austere
Of antique passion, fills our hearts again,
We marvel at our light and frivolous ear.
Ah! how they answer from the woodland glades!
How deep and rich the waves of music pour
On night's enchanted shore!
From star-lit alleys where the elm-tree shades
The hare's smooth leverets from the moon's distress
From pools all silvered o'er,
Where water-buds their petals upward press,
Vibrating with the song, and stir, and shed
Their inmost perfume o'er their shining bed,
Yea, from each copse I hear a bird,
As by a more than mortal woe undone,
Sing, as no other creature ever sang,
Since through the Phrygian forests Atys heard
His wild compeers come fluting one by one,
Till all the silent uplands rang and rang.