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Home  »  The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century  »  Josiah Conder (1789–1855)

Alfred H. Miles, ed. The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Sonnets. I. Summer Is Come. 2. “Now day survives the sun”

Josiah Conder (1789–1855)

From “Summer in Four Sonnets”

NOW day survives the sun. The pale grey skies

A sort of dull and dubious lustre keep,

As with their own light shining. Nature lies

Slumbering, and gazing on me in her sleep,

So still, so mute, with fixed and soul-less eyes.

The sun is set, yet not a star is seen:

Distinct the landscape, save where intervene

The creeping mists that from the dark stream rise;

Now spread into a sea with islets broken,

And woodland points, now poised on the thin air:

In the black west the clouds a storm betoken,

And all things seem a spectral gloom to wear.

The cautious bat resents the lingering light,

And the long-folded sheep wonder it is not night.