The Nightingale Near the House

HERE is the soundless cypress on the lawn:

It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond

Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond

Stares. And you sing, you sing.

That star-enchanted song falls through the air

From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,

Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;

And all the night you sing.

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee

As all night long I listen, and my brain

Receives your song; then loses it again

In moonlight on the lawn.

Now is your voice a marble high and white,

Then like a mist on fields of paradise,

Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,

Then breaks, and it is dawn.