The Bird at Dawn
Harold Monro 1879 (Brussels) – 1932
What I saw was just one eye
In the dawn as I was going :
A bird can carry all the sky
In that little button glowing.
Never in my life I went
So deep into the firmament.
He was standing on a tree,
All in blossom overflowing;
And he purposely looked hard at me,
At first, as if to question merrily :
' Where are you going ? '
But next some far more serious thing to say :
I could not answer, could not look away.
Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye :
Little mirror of all the sky ! --
And then the after-song another tree
Held, and sent radiating back on me.
If no man had invented human word,
And a bird-song had been
The only way to utter what we mean,
What would we men have heard,
What understood, what seen,
Between the trills and pauses, in between
The singing and the silence of a bird?
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 03, 2023
- 47 sec read
- 356 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABAB CC DBDDBEE AADD FXGFGGF |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 808 |
Words | 159 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 2, 7, 4, 7 |
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"The Bird at Dawn" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/16860/the-bird-at-dawn>.
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