Page:Poems Bacon.djvu/28

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THE SONS OF SLEEP
Now the wayfaring, now the restless earth,
Descrying on her dim and trackless verge
The dear, awaited dawning of the night,
Moves slowly in a languor of desire,
And drifts into the haven of her sleep.

Like dropping of the sweet and gradual rain,
Full flooding all the parchèd doors of growth,
The multitudinous lips of all the flowers,
The whispering insistence of dry leaves,
All cool and rill-like flowing, falls our sleep.

As the long thunderous surge of ocean waves
That lull eternally the listening shore,
Slow sweeping in from vast and caverned depths,
Comes the white tide that washes loose our souls,
To drown them tenderly in depths of sleep.

Soft stealing like the swathed and plumed dusk,
Enwrapped in shadows, shod with silences,
Unceasing, unresisted, unobserved,
Embosoming the lapsed and languid earth,
Slips o'er the sons of men close-feathered sleep.

By day they walk diverse and isolate,
Sunken in self they skulk their separate ways,

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