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Poems (Rossetti, 1901)/Twilight Calm

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4552504Poems — Twilight CalmChristina Georgina Rossetti
TWILIGHT CALM.
  OH, pleasant eventide!
  Clouds on the western side
Grow grey and greyer, hiding the warm sun:
The bees and birds, their happy labours done,
  Seek their close nests and bide.

  Screened in the leafy wood
  The stock-doves sit and brood:
The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough
But lazily; pauses; and settles now
  Where once he stored his food.

  One by one the flowers close,
  Lily and dewy rose
Shutting their tender petals from the moon:
The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon
  Are still the noisy crows.

  The dormouse squats and eats
  Choice little dainty bits
Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime;
Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time
  And listens where he sits.

  From far the lowings come
  Of cattle driven home:
From farther still the wind brings fitfully
The vast continual murmur of the sea,
  Now loud, now almost dumb.

  The gnats whirl in the air,
  The evening gnats; and there
The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail
For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail
  Comes forth, clammy and bare.

  Hark! that's the nightingale,
  Telling the self-same tale
Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
So echoes answered when her song was sung
  In the first wooded vale.

  We call it love and pain
  The passion of her strain;
And yet we little understand or know:
Why should it not be rather joy that so
  Throbs in each throbbing vein?

  In separate herds the deer
  Lie; here the bucks, and here
The does, and by its mother sleeps the fawn:
Through all the hours of night until the dawn
  They sleep, forgetting fear.

  The hare sleeps where it lies,
  With wary half-closed eyes;
The cock has ceased to crow, the hen to cluck:
Only the fox is out, some heedless luck
  Or chicken to surprise.

  Remote, each single star
  Comes out, till there they are
All shining brightly: how the dews fall damp!
While close at hand the glow-worm lights her lamp,
  Or twinkles from afar.

  But evening now is done
  As much as if the sun
Day-giving had arisen in the East:
For night has come; and the great calm has ceased,
  The quiet sands have run.