Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Sonnets: Night and Morning. I. Night

Edith (Nesbit) Bland (1858–1924)

WHILE yet the woods were hardly more than brown,

Filled with the stillness of the dying day

The folds and farms and faint green pastures lay,

And bells chimed softly from the gray-walled town.

The dark fields with the corn and poppies sown,

The dark delicious dreamy forest way,

The hope of April for the soul of May—

On all of these night’s wide soft wings swept down.

One yellow star pierced through the clear, pure sky,

And showed above the network of the wood,

The silence of whose crowded solitude

Was broken but by little woodland things

Rustling dead leaves with restless feet and wings

And by a kiss that ended in a sigh.