ASTROPHEL

A star in the silence that follows

The song of the death of the sun

Speaks music in heaven, and the hollows

And heights of the world are as one;

One lyre that outsings and outlightens

The rapture of sunset, and thrills

Mute night till the sense of it brightens

The soul that it fills.

The flowers of the sun that is sunken

Hang heavy of heart as of head;

The bees that have eaten and drunken

The soul of their sweetness are fled;

But a sunflower of song, on whose honey

My spirit has fed as a bee,

Makes sunnier than morning was sunny

The twilight for me.

The letters and lines on the pages

That sundered mine eyes and the flowers

Wax faint as the shadows of ages

That sunder their season and ours;

As the ghosts of the centuries that sever

A season of colourless time

From the days whose remembrance is ever,

As they were, sublime.

The season that bred and that cherished

The soul that I commune with yet,

Had it utterly withered and perished

To rise not again as it set,

Shame were it that Englishmen living

Should read as their forefathers read

The books of the praise and thanksgiving

Of Englishmen dead.

O light of the land that adored thee

And kindled thy soul with her breath,

Whose life, such as fate would afford thee,

Was lovelier than aught but thy death,

By what name, could thy lovers but know it,

Might love of thee hail thee afar,

Philisides, Astrophel, poet

Whose love was thy star?

A star in the moondawn of Maytime,

A star in the cloudland of change;

Too splendid and sad for the daytime

To cheer or eclipse or estrange;

Too sweet for tradition or vision

To see but through shadows of tears

Rise deathless across the division

Of measureless years.

The twilight may deepen and harden

As nightward the stream of it runs

Till starshine transfigure a garden

Whose radiance responds to the sun's:

The light of the love of thee darkens

The lights that arise and that set:

The love that forgets thee not hearkens

If England forget.