The House of Life: II. Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass

Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky

So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower

This close-companioned inarticulate hour

When twofold silence was the song of love