Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE SONG OF THE BIRDS, WHO HEARS, by EDWARD CARPENTER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE SONG OF THE BIRDS, WHO HEARS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The song of the birds, who hears? In the high trees calling
Last Line: And goal of its agelong pilgrimage.
Subject(s): Birds; Nature; Singing & Singers; Songs


THE songs of the birds, who hears? in the high trees calling,
All the long noon high calling?—
In the meadows below them the wind runs over the grass, the shadows
lengthen.
Who sees, who hears?—
In the wonderful height of heaven the clouds are flocked like sails,
Slow moving, floating, rounding from deep to deep.
The light swims slowly, changing over the world,
The distant peaks are touched; and the hills lie silent.
Who sees, who hears?

The fox-gloves tall out of the earth arise;
They stand up out of green shadow;
Out of night, out of seeds dim in the earth arising,
They look forth on the blue and green wilderness, and are changed as it
changes—
Changed out of all recognition.
Who sees, who hears?—

For all things melt and run—if you only watch them long enough!
And you cannot emprison anything in one shape—it will surely give you
the slip.
Nothing in essence dies, and nothing in mortal form remains. All is in
movement, long calculated, long determined on, with regard to another kind of
Form.
The diamond that you wear in your hair, the gold piece you hold so solid in
your hand—they are no more solid than a swarm of bees is solid—of
which the units are in constant motion to and fro, some leaving and some joining
the swarm.
They have other business than yours to attend to—they have other
spheres beside the market and the drawing-room—and they will surely give
you the slip.
The rocks flow and the mountain shapes flow,
And the forests swim over the lands like cloud-shadows
The lines of the seeming-everlasting sea are changed,
And its waves beat on unmapped plantom shores:
'Not here, not here!'
All creatures fade from the embraces of their names,
[And you and I, slow, slowly disentangling,]
The delicate hairbells quivering in the light,
The gorse, the heather, and the fox-gloves tall,
The meadows, and the river, rolling, fade:
Fade from their likenesses: fade crying ' Follow!
Follow, for ever follow!'

Who hears, who sees?
Who hears the word of Nature?
The word of her eternal breathing, whispered wherever one shall listen,
The word of the birds in the high trees calling,
Of the wind running over the grass,
The word of the glad prisoners, the tender footless creatures, the plants
of the earth,
Rising too, bright-eyed, out of their momentary masks?
'Not here! not here!'

But over all the world, shadowing, shadowing:
The dream! the vast and ever present miracle of all time!
The long-forgotten never-forgotten goal!
Over your own heart, out of its secretest depths:
In crystalline beauty!
Out of all creatures, cloud and mountain and river:
Exhaling, ascending!
From plant and bird and man and planet up-pouring: Thousand-formed, One,
The ever-present only present reality, source of all illusion,
The Self, the disclosure, the transfiguration of each creature,
And goal of its agelong pilgrimage.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net