Poem by Eleanor Farjeon

The World’s Amazing Beauty

The world’s amazing beauty would make us cry
Aloud; but something in it strikes us dumb.
Beech-forests drenched in sunny floods
Where shaking rays and shadows hum,
The unrepeated aspects of the sky,
Clouds in their lightest and their wildest moods,
Bare shapes of hills, June grass in flower,
The sea in every hour,
Slopes that one January morning flow
Unbrokenly with snow,
Peaks piercing heaven with motions sharp and harsh,
Slow-moving flats, grey reed and silver marsh,
A flock of swans in flight
Or solitary heron flapping home,
Orchards of pear and cherry turning white,
Low apple-trees with rosy-budded boughs,
Streams where young willows drink and cows,
Earth’s rich ploughed loam
Thinking darkly forward to her sheaves,
Water in Autumn spotted with yellow leaves,
Light running overland,
Gulls standing still above their images
On strips of shining sand
While evening in a haze of green
Half-hides
The calm receding tides--
What in the beauty we have seen in these
Keeps us still silent? something we have not seen?

1. Sonnets. 9. Love Needs not Two the Render It Complete
2. The Reflection
3. In the Oculist's Anteroom
4. Sonnets. 16. O lovely life, how you have worn me out
5. Sonnets. 10. What is this anguish then that always stands

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