Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

VI. Animate Nature

The Nightingale’s Song

Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649)

NOW westward Sol had spent the richest beams

Of noon’s high glory, when, hard by the streams

Of Tiber, on the scene of a green plat,

Under protection of an oak, there sat

A sweet lute’s-master, in whose gentle airs

He lost the day’s heat and his own hot cares.

Close in the covert of the leaves there stood

A nightingale, come from the neighboring wood

(The sweet inhabitant of each glad tree,

Their muse, their siren, harmless siren she):

There stood she listening, and did entertain

The music’s soft report, and mould the same

In her own murmurs; that whatever mood

His curious fingers lent, her voice made good.

This lesson too

She gives them back; her supple breast thrills out

Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt

Of dallying sweetness, hovers o’er her skill,

And folds in waved notes, with a trembling bill,

The pliant series of her slippery song;

Then starts she suddenly into a throng

Of short thick sobs, whose thundering volleys float,

And roll themselves over her lubric throat

In panting murmurs, stilled out of her breast;

That ever-bubbling spring, the sugared nest

Of her delicious soul, that there does lie

Bathing in streams of liquid melody;

Music’s best seed-plot; when in ripened airs

A golden-headed harvest fairly rears

His honey-dropping tops ploughed by her breath

Which there reciprocally laboreth.

In that sweet soil it seems a holy quire,

Sounded to the name of great Apollo’s lyre;

Whose silver roof rings with the sprightly notes

Of sweet-lipped angel-imps, that swill their throats

In cream of morning Helicon, and then

Prefer soft anthems to the ears of men,

To woo them from their beds, still murmuring

That men can sleep while they their matins sing

(Most divine service), whose so early lay

Prevents the eyelids of the blushing day.

There might you hear her kindle her soft voice

In the close murmur of a sparkling noise;

And lay the groundwork of her hopeful song.

Still keeping in the forward stream so long,

Till a sweet whirlwind (striving to get out)

Heaves her soft bosom, wanders round about,

And makes a pretty earthquake in her breast,

Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nest,

Fluttering in wanton shoals, and to the sky,

Winged with their own wild echoes, prattling fly.

She opes the floodgate, and lets loose a tide

Of streaming sweetness, which in state doth ride

On the waved back of every swelling strain,

Rising and falling in a pompous train;

And while she thus discharges a shrill peal

Of flashing airs, she qualifies their zeal

With the cool epode of a graver note;

Thus high, thus low, as if her silver throat

Would reach the brazen voice of war’s hoarse bird;

Her little soul is ravished, and so poured

Into loose ecstasies, that she is placed

Above herself, music’s enthusiast.