OUT OF THE MOON

By John Drinkwater

Merely the moonlight

Piercing the boughs of my may-tree,

Falling upon my ferns;

Only the night

Touching my ferns with silver bloom

Of sea-flowers here in the sleeping city —

And suddenly the imagination burns

With knowledge of many a dark significant doom

Out of antiquity,

Sung to hushed halls by troubadours

Who knew the ways of the heart because they had seen

The moonlight washing the garden’ s deeper green

To silver flowers,

Falling with tidings out of the moon, as now

It falls on the ferns under my may-tree bough.