Reveille

Still bathed in its moonlight slumber, the little white house by the cedar
Stands silent against the red dawn;
And nothing I know of who sleeps there, to the travail of day yet unwakened,
Behind the blue curtains undrawn:

But I dream as we march down the roadway, ringing loud and white-rimed in the moonlight,
Of a little dark house on a hill
Wherein when the battle is over, to the rapture of day yet unwakened,
We shall slumber as dreamless and still.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson was a British Georgian poet, known for his early association with Rupert Brooke and other poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. His works primarily dealt with the lives of ordinary people and reflected the grim realities of war. He is also recognized for his contribution to the war poetry genre, capturing the human cost of conflict with stark realism and empathy.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

The Cakewalk

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Simple Poetry

Philip And Phoebe Ware

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Simple Poetry

Driftwood

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Simple Poetry

English

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Tenants

Suddenly, out of dark and leafy ways,
We came upon the little house asleep
In cold blind stillness, shadowless and deep,
In the white magic of the full moon-blaze.
Strangers without the gate, we stood agaze,
Fearful to break that quiet, and to creep
Into the home that had been ours to keep
Through a long year of happy nights and days.

So unfamiliar in the white moon-gleam,
So old and ghostly like a house of dream
It seemed, that over us there stole the dread
That even as we watched it, side by side,
The ghosts of lovers, who had lived and died
Within its walls, were sleeping in our bed.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Devil's Edge

All night I lay on Devil's Edge,
Along an overhanging ledge
Between the sky and sea:
And as I rested 'waiting sleep,
The windless sky and soundless deep
In one dim, blue infinity
Of starry peace encompassed me.

And I remembered, drowsily,
How 'mid the hills last night I'd lain
Beside a singing moorland burn;
And waked at dawn, to feel the rain
Fall on my face, as on the fern
That drooped about my heather-bed;
And how by noon the wind had blown
The last grey shred from out the sky,
And blew my homespun jacket dry,
As I stood on the topmost stone
That crowns the cairn on Hawkshaw Head,
And caught a gleam of far-off sea;
And heard the wind sing in the bent
Like those far waters calling me:
When, my heart answering to the call,
...

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Quiet

Only the footprints of the partridge run
Over the billowy drifts on the mountain-side;
And now on level wings the brown birds glide
Following the snowy curves, and in the sun
Bright birds of gold above the stainless white
They move, and as the pale blue shadows move,
With them my heart glides on in golden flight
Over the hills of quiet to my love.

Storm-shaken, racked with terror through the long
Tempestuous night, in the quiet blue of morn
Love drinks the crystal airs, and peace newborn
Within his troubled heart, on wings aglow
Soars into rapture, as from the quiet snow
The golden birds; and out of silence, song.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

The Soldier's Dream

Our bugles sang truce; for the night-cloud had lowered,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,
By the wolf-scaring fagot that guarded the slain,
At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw,
And thrice ere the morning I dreamt it again.

Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array
Far, far I had roamed on a desolate track:
'Twas autumn; and sunshine arose on the way
To the home of my fathers, that welcomed my back.

I flew to the pleasant fields traversed so oft
In life's morning march, when my bosom was young;
I heard my own mountain-goats bleating aloft,
And knew the sweet strains that the ...

Thomas Campbell

Milking Time

There's a drip of honeysuckle in the deep green lane;
There's old Martin jogging homeward on his worn old wain;
There are cherry petals falling, and a cuckoo calling, calling,
And a score of larks (God bless 'em) . . . but it's all pain, pain.
For you see I am not really there at all, not at all;
For you see I'm in the trenches where the crump-crumps fall;
And the bits o' shells are screaming and it's only blessed dreaming
That in fancy I am seeming back in old Saint Pol.

Oh I've thought of it so often since I've come down here;
And I never dreamt that any place could be so dear;
The silvered whinstone houses, and the rosy men in blouses,
And the kindly, white-capped women with their eyes spring-clear.
And mother's sitting knitting where her roses climb,
And the angelu...

Robert William Service

A Noonday Melody

Everything goes to its rest;
    The hills are asleep in the noon;
And life is as still in its nest
    As the moon when she looks on a moon
In the depth of a calm river's breast
    As it steals through a midnight in June.

The streams have forgotten the sea
    In the dream of their musical sound;
The sunlight is thick on the tree,
    And the shadows lie warm on the ground,--
So still, you may watch them and see
    Every breath that awakens around.

The churchyard lies still in the heat,
    With its handful of mouldering bone,
As still as the long stalk of wheat
    In the shadow that sits by the stone,
As still as the grass at my feet
    When I walk in the meadows alone.

The waves are asleep on the main,
    And the ships ...

George MacDonald