Nightgown

“ I could not understand in the least why the sleeping darling must be indued with little chemise, and flannel, and nightgown, and I do not know what all, requiring a world of nice care, and a hundred turnings to and fro, now on its little stomach, now on its back, now sitting up, now lying down, when it would have slept just as well, and I venture to think much more comfortably, if laid in blankets and well covered over. ”

“ And in this wise passed three days and nights; yet both in the sleep-time and the time of waking did great multitudes cease not to watch; so that many went hungry for sleep, as in truth did I. And sometimes we saw those Youths with plainness; but other times they were lost to our sight in the utter shadows of the Night Land. Yet, by the telling of our instruments, and the sense of my hearing, there was no awaredness among the Monsters, and the Forces of Evil, that any were abroad from the Pyramid; so that a little hope came into our hearts that yet there might be no tragedy. ”

“ And again the flash to come, and mayhap a score times after; and there to come down out of the height a peculiar crackling sound, that did be less than the thunder of this age, yet more loud than any other sound that you ever to hear. And lo! I knew that the Humans did begin to fight for me, that I bring Mine Own safe unto Home.
And behold! it did be as that all the wakefulness of the Land that had been, did be but as sleep, beside the wakefulness that now to come; for surely the Night now to seem to rock with the roarings of the Monsters, and with the be-stirring of Great Forces. ”

“ And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to ignorance; but to a full knowledge of those things which lit the Night Land; even as a man wakes from sleep each morning, and knows immediately he wakes, the names and knowledge of the Time which has bred him, and in which he lives. ”

“ PART I.—Poems Mostly Written at Charterhouse—1910-1914
[6]
STAR-TALK
"Are you awake, Gemelli,
This frosty night?"
"We'll be awake till reveillé,
Which is Sunrise," say the Gemelli,
"It's no good trying to go to sleep:
If there's wine to be got we'll drink it deep,
But sleep is gone to to-night,
But sleep is gone for to-night."
"Are you cold too, poor Pleiads,
This frosty night?"
"Yes, and so are the Hyads:
See us cuddle and hug," say the Pleiads,
"All six in a ring: it keeps us warm:
We huddle together like birds in a storm:
It's bitter weather to-night,
It's bitter weather to-night." ”

“ In the long watches of the winter night, when one has awoke from some evil dream, and lies sleepless and terrified with the solemn pall of darkness around one—on one of those deadly, still dark nights, when the window only shows a murky patch of positive gloom in contrast with the nothingness of the walls, when the howling of a tempest round chimney and roof would be welcomed as a boisterous companion—in such still dead times only, lying as in the silence of the tomb, one realises that some day we shall lie in that bed and not think at all: that the time will come soon when we must die. ”

“ And I turned and looked down the slope; and surely all before me was utter wildness of a dark desolation; for it did seem to go nowhither but into an everlasting night. And there was no fire down there, neither light of any kind; but only Darkness and, as I did feel, Eternity. And downward into that Blackness did the great slope seem to go for ever.
Now, as I did stand there, looking downward into the Dark, and often backward unto the shining of the Final Light, and put to a horrid desolateness, behold! there came the low beating of the Master-Word in the Night. ”

“ And we yet to look awhile, and to be husht, and to hark in those last moments unto the far mutter of the Great Fire-Mountains, and the Fire-Hills, and the noise of life which did go over that Land; and we even then to be but a few short pacings off from the silence of the Great Gorge, which should lead us presently toward the Eternal Strangeness which did be in the Night Land. And the Maid did hold mine arm very close, as we lookt our last into the red light of that Deep and Hid Country of the World, where, in verity, we had come so utter nigh to our Death. ”

“ Night is the city's disease.
The streets and the people one sees
Glow with a light that is strangely inhuman;
A fever that never grows cold.
Heaven completes the disgrace;
For now, with her star-pitted face,
Night has the leer of a dissolute woman,
Cynical, moon-scarred and old.
And I think of the country roads;
Of the quiet, sleeping abodes,
Where every tree is a silent brother
And the hearth is a thing to cling to.
And I sicken and long for it now—
To feel clean winds on my brow,
Where Night bends low, like an all-wise mother
Looking for children to sing to. ”

“ While I read in that dolorous book about souls, the night crept forward into the profound darkness of early morning. With evening had come a swift warmth, breeding, out of its meeting with the chill of the day, a thick fog, which laid its blank gray face against the lamp-light of my open window—a face un-featured except by the ghost of a scantily leaved branch, whose supporting tree trunk was hidden as if beneath deep water. ”

“ Night long since had settled on us, yet not profound darkness. Night in midsummer seems to partake of a forgotten cousinship with the day. It is a luminous darkness that prevails, and encumbers the night as with a lucid mist. I could stand by the babbling shore and pierce the brooding veil upon the sea with the shafts my eyes, and feel none of the oppression of that blankness that falls with night in winter. And I could descry also the remote and twinkling lights of Southington over waters that were not black but rather ghostly. Distress had settled upon us also with the darkness. ”

“ We who sit at home and draw the blinds and shut the shutters as soon as night appears, who gather round the fire when the wind is wild, who pray at regular seasons and in familiar shrines, know little of the demoniac look of night when it is filled with curses of false, infuriated gods. Such a night was this. Though in the heights the fleecy clouds were idle, yet the wind was stirring mournfully in the abyss and moaning as it stirred, unhappily at first and full of sorrow ”

“ And when that the eighteenth hour of that day was come, we to draw inward our paddles, and the Maid set the cloak very nice to be our bed, and afterward we eat and drank, and so presently to our slumber, and did have sleep, very sound and happy, all in a moment, as it to seem.
And eight good hours after, we did waken both of us, together; and lo! we scarce to mind where we did be for a little moment ”

“ The nocturnal sky is the great coffin; to sweep the sky of night, we must have a brush; to sunder the good grain from the bad during the night, as the cruel mother-in-law commands, we must have a sieve; the child-sun arrives, in the twilight, in the bottom of the coffin, at the doorstep of the royal palace, and presents to the maiden aurora (the Vedic cleaner or purifier) the brush and the sieve. The sun, at twilight, is neither in nor out. ”

“ What mirth and what weariness?
What valour from vanished years
In the heart of youth confined?
What wellsprings of unshed tears
For the loves they leave behind?
No sleep, my soul to befriend; [Pg 16]
No voice, neither answering light!
But darkness that knows no end
And feet going by in the night.
[Pg 17]
Night in the Suburbs, August, 1914 THE misty night broods o'er this peopled place,
Chimneys and trees stand black against the sky,
One goes belated by with echoing pace
And careless whistle, shrilling loud and high. ”

“ When the footpads quail at the night-bird's wail, and black dogs bay the moon,
Then is the spectre's holiday—then is the ghosts' high noon!
As the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen,
From grey tomb-stones are gathered the bones that once were women and men,
And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon,
For cockcrow limits our holiday—the dead of the night's high noon! ”

“ And presently, I spied outward to the West, as it did seem a good mile off in the night, the shining of a fire-hole; and I began to plan that I should come unto that place, and have warmth and dryness, and food and slumber. And, in verity, so set was I to the need of these matters that if there did be a Monstrous Thing nigh to the fire—as was so oft the case—then would I give battle unto it; for neither my Joy nor my labours did serve to put warmth into my body; and I must surely come anigh to fire, or die. ”

“ The haunted night returns again.
[Pg 83]
Now we behold the embers flee
About the firelit hearth; and see
Our faces painted as we pass,
Like pictures, on the window-glass.
Must we to bed indeed? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.
Farewell, O brother, sister, sire!
O pleasant party round the fire!
The songs you sing, the tales you tell,
Till far to-morrow, fare ye well!
[Pg 84]
"The wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp." II. SHADOW MARCH
All round the house is the jet-black night ”

“ The daylight is dying
Away in the west,
The wild birds are flying
In silence to rest;
In leafage and frondage
Where shadows are deep,
They pass to its bondage --
The kingdom of sleep.
And watched in their sleeping
By stars in the height,
They rest in your keeping,
O wonderful night. ”

“ It is good to be able to wink defiance at the Night, the cold, unseeing Night. How weird, how gruesome, how chilly it would be if I stood here in blackness, a shadow addressing shadows, in a house of blindness! Yet each would know that he was not alone; yet might we stretch hands and touch each other, and feel the warmth of human presence near. Yet might a sympathetic voice ring thro' the darkness, quickening the dragging moments. ”

“ Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem to be alive. ”

“ And at the moment when the camp fires pale and the smoke goes grey to the sky, and camels sniff the dawn, suddenly Morning forgot Night. And out of that arbour of the gods, and away to the haunts of the dark, Night with his swart cloak slunk away; and Morning placed her hand upon the mists and drew them upward and revealed the earth, and drove the shadows before her, and they followed Night. And suddenly the mystery quitted haunting shapes, and an old glamour was gone, and far and wide over the fields of earth a new splendour arose. ”

“ No other sound comes from the breast of nature to mar the richness of its tone. No earthly thing seems living but itself. For it the night appears created, and draws its "sable curtain stained with gold" over the sleeping world. This nightingale, of all the feathered tribes, is wakeful, and chants its hymn of praise at midnight, whilst all its brethren rest in peaceful slumber. ”

“ They seem peculiarly appropriated to the night. There is a sort of plaintive melody about them, that is lost in all the gay buz and bustle of sunshine. But at night, when the dull crowd, whose feelings are more purely animal, have left Nature to her own quiet pensiveness--when there is no sound to distract, and no light to dazzle--the song of the nightingale comes like the voice of the spirit rising alone to heaven, with that kind of melancholy, solitary sweetness, which harmonises so sweetly with anything vast and beautiful. ”

“ BIRD RAPTURES. The sunrise wakes the lark to sing, The moonrise wakes the nightingale. Come darkness, moonrise, every thing That is so silent, sweet, and pale: Come, so ye wake the nightingale. Make haste to mount, thou wistful moon, Make haste to wake the nightingale: Let silence set the world in tune [264] To hearken to that wordless tale Which warbles from the nightingale O herald skylark, stay thy flight One moment, for a nightingale Floods us with sorrow and delight. To-morrow thou shalt hoist the sail; Leave us to-night the nightingale. ”

“ Manuscript of "To Night", page 1 Manuscript of "To Night", page 2
Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear--
Swift be thy flight!
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of day ”

“ Such a clear, moonlight night, when the air seems to have stiffened in cold light, and the clouds lie there in long layers—Tema, flowers and leaves hold their fragrance so close around them it is like a frost of scents covering them, and all sounds seem so far away and die so suddenly and do not linger at all—Such a night is so merciless, for it makes longing grow so strangely intense; the silence draws it out from every corner of your soul, sucks it out with hard lips, and there is no glimmering hope, no slumbering promise in all that clearness. ”

“ On a midsummer night, on a night that was eerie with stars,
In a wood too deep for a single star to look through,
You led down a path whose turnings you knew in the darkness,
But the scent of the dew-dripping cedars was all that I knew. ”

“ Yet she says she will come again and after the sun has travelled through the world in search of the beloved, when he is in the threshold of death, and is going to end his solitary life, she appears again in the Gloaming, the same as the Dawn, at the end of the dreary day when the sun seemed to die away in the far west, the heavens opened and the glorious image of the Dawn rose again, her beauty deepened by a gloaming darkness. ”

“ If in the noon they doubted, their last breath
Saluted once again the eternal goal,
Chanted a love-song in the face of Death
And rent the veil of darkness from the soul.
129
If in the noon they doubted, in the night
They waved the shadowy world of strife aside,
Flooded high heaven with an immortal light,
And taught the deep how its Creator died.
130
THE CRY IN THE NIGHT
IT tears at the heart in the night, that moan of the wind,
That desolate moan.
It is worse than the cry of a child. ”