Ernest Charles Jones

Moonrise

WHAT stands upon the Highland?
    What walks across the rise,
As tho' a starry island
    Were sinking down the skies?

What makes the trees so golden?
    What decks the mountain-side,
Like a veil of silver folden
    Round the white brow of a bride?

The magic moon is breaking
    Like a conqueror from the East,
The waiting world awaking
    To a golden fairy-feast.

She works with touch ethereal
    By changes strange to see,
The cypress so funereal
    To a lightsome fairy tree;

Black rocks to marble turning,
    Like palaces of kings;
On ruin-windows burning
    A festal glory flings;

The desert halls uplighting,
    While falling shadows glance,
Like courtly crowds uniting
    For the banquet or the dance;

With ivory wand she numbers
    The stars along the sky,
And breaks the billows' slumbers
    With a love-glance of her eye;

Along the cornfields dances,
    Brings bloom upon the sheaf;
From tree to tree she glances,
    And touches leaf by leaf;

Wakes birds that sleep in shadows,
    Thro' their half-closed eyelids gleams;
With her white torch thro' the meadows
    Lights the shy deer to the streams.

The magic moon is breaking
    Like a conqueror from the East,
And the joyous world partaking
    Of her golden fairy-feast.