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The High Oaks

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Fourscore years and seven

Light and dew from heaven

Have fallen with dawn on these glad woods each day

Since here was born, even here,

A birth more bright and dear

Than ever a younger year

Hath seen or shall till all these pass away,

Even all the imperious pride of these,

The woodland ways majestic now with towers of trees.

Love itself hath nought

Touched of tenderest thought

With holiest hallowing of memorial grace

For memory, blind with bliss,

To love, to clasp, to kiss,

So sweetly strange as this,

The sense that here the sun first hailed her face,

A babe at Her glad mother's breast,

And here again beholds it more beloved and blest.

Love's own heart, a living

Spring of strong thanksgiving,

Can bid no strength of welling song find way

When all the soul would seek

One word for joy to speak,

And even its strength makes weak

The too strong yearning of the soul to say

What may not be conceived or said

While darkness makes division of the quick and dead.

Haply, where the sun

Wanes, and death is none,

The word known here of silence only, held

Too dear for speech to wrong,

May leap in living song

Forth, and the speech be strong

As here the silence whence it yearned and welled

From hearts whose utterance love sealed fast

Till death perchance might give it grace to live at last.

Here we have our earth

Yet, with all the mirth

Of all the summers since the world began,

All strengths of rest and strife

And love-lit love of life

Where death has birth to wife,

And where the sun speaks, and is heard of man:

Yea, half the sun's bright speech is heard,

And like the sea the soul of man gives back his word.

Earth's enkindled heart

Bears benignant part

In the ardent heaven's auroral pride of prime:

If ever home on earth

Were found of heaven's grace worth

So God-beloved a birth

As here makes bright the fostering face of time,

Here, heaven bears witness, might such grace

Fall fragrant as the dewfall on that brightening face.

Here, for mine and me,

All that eyes may see

Hath more than all the wide world else of good,

All nature else of fair:

Here as none otherwhere

Heaven is the circling air,

Heaven is the homestead, heaven the wold, the wood:

The fragrance with the shadow spread

From broadening wings of cedars breathes of dawn's bright bed.

Once a dawn rose here

More divine and dear,

Rose on a birth-bed brighter far than dawn's,

Whence all the summer grew

Sweet as when earth was new

And pure as Eden's dew:

And yet its light lives on these lustrous lawns,

Clings round these wildwood ways, and cleaves

To the aisles of shadow and sun that wind unweaves and weaves.

Thoughts that smile and weep,

Dreams that hallow sleep,

Brood in the branching shadows of the trees,

Tall trees at agelong rest

Wherein the centuries nest,

Whence, blest as these are blest,

We part, and part not from delight in these;

Whose comfort, sleeping as awake,

We bear about within us as when first it spake.

Comfort as of song

Grown with time more strong,

Made perfect and prophetic as the sea,

Whose message, when it lies

Far off our hungering eyes,

Within us prophesies

Of life not ours, yet ours as theirs may be

Whose souls far off us shine and sing

As ere they sprang back sunward, swift as fire might spring.

All this oldworld pleasance

Hails a hallowing presence,

And thrills with sense of more than summer near,

And lifts toward heaven more high

The song-surpassing cry

Of rapture that July

Lives, for her love who makes it loveliest here;

For joy that she who here first drew

The breath of life she gave me breathes it here anew.

Never birthday born

Highest in height of morn

Whereout the star looks forth that leads the sun

Shone higher in love's account,

Still seeing the mid noon mount

From the eager dayspring's fount

Each year more lustrous, each like all in one;

Whose light around us and above

We could not see so lovely save by grace of love.