Poem by Robert Lowell

The Lesson

No longer to lie reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles,
while the high, mysterious squirrels
rain small green branches on our sleep!

All that landscape, one likes to think it died
or slept with us, that we ourselves died
or slept then in the age and second of our habitation.

The green leaf cushions the same dry footprint,
or the child’s boat luffs in the same dry chop,
and we are where we were. We were!

Perhaps the trees stopped growing in summer amnesia;
their day that gave them veins is rooted down —
and the nights? They are for sleeping now as then.

Ah the light lights the window of my young night,
and you never turn off the light,
while the books lie in the library, and go on reading.

The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge,
cold slits the same crease in the finger,
the same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.

1. The Drunken Fisherman
2. To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage
3. Children of Light
4. Waking in the Blue
5. Dolphin

Rose Cooke The Lesson ("Flutter thy new wings lightly")

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