sonnet

The Starlight Night

1    Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
2       O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
3       The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
4    Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
5    The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
6       Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
7       Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
8    Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

9    Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
10   Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
11      Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
12   These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
13   The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
14      Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

1           Glory be to God for dappled things—  
2             For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;  
3        For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;  
4    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;  
5      Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough:  
6        And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.  
7            All things counter, original, spáre, strange;  
8              Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)  
9               With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;  
10           He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:  
11                                            Práise hím.

1     Inside me is a black-eyed animal
2     Bracing in a small stall. As if a bird
3     Could grow without breaking its shell.
4     As if the clatter of a thousand black
5     Birds whipping in a storm could be held
6     In a shell. Inside me is a huge black
7     Bull balled small enough to fit inside
8     The bead of a nipple ring. I mean to leave
9     A record of my raptures. I was raised
10    By a beautiful man. I loved his grasp of time.
11    My mother shaped my grasp of space.
12    Would you rather spend the rest of eternity
13    With your wild wings bewildering a cage or
14    With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt?