The Nightingale

Like a clamorous Hock of startled birds,
All my memories swoop upon me,
Swoop among the yellow foliage
Of my heart, watching its bent alder-trunk
In the purple foil of the waters of Regret
That How nearby in melancholy wise;
They swoop, and then the horrid clamor,
That a moist breeze calms as it rises,
Dies gradually in the tree-until
At the end of a moment nothing more is heard.
Nothing but the voice hymning the Absent One,
Nothing but the voice-the languishing voice -
Of the bird that was my Earliest Love,
Singing still as on that earliest day;
And in the sad magnificence of a moon
That rises with pale solemnity, a
Summer night, heavy and melancholy,
Full of silence and obscurity,
Lulls in the sky that a soft wind caresses
The quivering tree and the weeping bird.