Eleanor Farjeon

Nightingales

The nightingales around our house
Among the lovely orchard boughs:
Where the young apple-dawn too soon
Turns whiter than the daylit moon,
And ’mid its shadowy silver bowers
The quince is flushed with heavenly flowers
That opening poise as though for flight:
The nightingales sing day and night,
With piercing, long, insistent calling,
And chuckle of sweet waters falling,
And unimaginable trill
That makes my heart beat and stand still.

Oh, even so, by night and day
When first the earth broke into May
Ere men shut thunder up in shells,
They came and sang their miracles;
And so, in myriad Mays to come,
When all those damnèd storms are dumb
And only heaven’s lightning crowns
Her clouds of thunder on the Downs,
They still will come, by night and day
To sing the radiant Spring away,
Till men lie crumbled with their towns
And earth no more breaks into May.