Old Song

    My window is darkness,
    The sighs of the night die in silence;
    The lamp on my table
    Burns gravely, the walls are withdrawn;
    And beneath, in your darkness,
    You are sleeping and dreaming forgetful,
    But I think of you smiling,
    For I'm wakeful and now it is only an hour to the dawn.

    When the first throb of light comes
    I shall rise and go out to the garden,
    And walk the lawn's verdure
    Before the wet gossamer goes;
    And when you come down, sweet,
    All singing and light in the morning,
    Delight will break ambush
    With your garden's most fragrant and softest and reddest red rose.

John Collings Squire, Sir

John Collings Squire, also known as Sir John Squire, was an influential British poet, writer, historian, and influential literary editor of the early 20th century. He is best known for his role as editor of the London Mercury, a powerful literary journal of the time. Squire was a leading figure in the Georgian poetry movement, which sought to return English poetry to its traditional form and diction.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Epilogue

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

Constantinople

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

The Three Hills

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

The Fugitive

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Song

    You are my sky; beneath your circling kindness
    My meadows all take in the light and grow;
        Laugh with the joy you've given,
        The joy you've given,
    And open in a thousand buds, and blow.

    But when you are sombre, sad, averse, forgetful,
    Heavily veiled by clouds that brood with rain,
        Dumbly I lie all shadowed,
        I lie all shadowed,
    And dumbly wait for you to shine again.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Song

    The heaven is full of the moon's light,
    The earth fades below.
    In this vast empty world of night
    I only know

    Pale-shining trees and moonlit fields,
    The bird's tune,
    And my night-flowering heart that yields
    Her fragrance to the moon.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Prologue: In Darkness

    With my sleeping beloved huddled tranquil beside me, why do I lie awake,
    Listening to the loud clock's hurry in the darkness, and feeling my heart's fierce ache
    That beats one response to the brain's many questionings, and in solitude bears the weight
    Of all the world's evil and misery and frustration, and the senseless pressure of fate?

    Is it season of ploughing and sowing, this long vigil, that so certainly it recurs?
    In this unsought return of a pain that was ended, is it here that a song first stirs?
    Can it be that from this, when to-night's gone from memory, there will spring of a sudden, some time,
    Like a silver lily breaking from black deadly waters, the thin-blown shape of a rhyme?

John Collings Squire, Sir

The Evening Hours.

The sultry day it wears away,
And o'er the distant leas
The mist again, in purple stain,
Falls moist on flower and trees:
His home to find, the weary hind
Glad leaves his carts and ploughs;
While maidens fair, with bosoms bare,
Go coolly to their cows.

The red round sun his work has done,
And dropp'd into his bed;
And sweetly shin'd the oaks behind
His curtains fringed with red:
And step by step the night has crept,
And day, as loth, retires;
But clouds, more dark, night's entrance mark.
Till day's last spark expires.

Pride of the vales, the nightingales
Now charm the oaken grove;
And loud and long, with amorous tongue,
They try to please their love:
And where the rose reviving blows
Upon the swelter'd bower,
I'll take...

John Clare

Song

    Eyes like flowers and falling hair
    Seldom seen, nor ever long,
    Then I did not know you were
    Destined subject for a song:
    Sharing your unconsciousness
    Of your double loveliness,
    Unaware how fair you were,
    Peaceful eyes and shadowy hair.

    Only, now your beauty falls
    Sweetly on some other place,
    Lonely reverie recalls
    More than anything your face;
    Any idle hour may find
    Stealing on my captured mind,
    Faintly merging from the air,
    Eyes like flowers and falling hair.

John Collings Squire, Sir

At Night

    Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky,
    Blue moonlight bars the drive;
    Here at the open window I
    Sit smoking and alive.

    Wind in the branches swells and breaks
    Like ocean on a beach;
    Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes
    A thought I cannot reach.

John Collings Squire, Sir