The Bird at Dawn

Harold Monro 1879 (Brussels) – 1932



What I saw was just one eye
In the dawn as I was going :
A bird can carry all the sky
In that little button glowing.

Never in my life I went
So deep into the firmament.

He was standing on a tree,
All in blossom overflowing;
And he purposely looked hard at me,
At first, as if to question merrily :
' Where are you going ? '
But next some far more serious thing to say :
I could not answer, could not look away.

Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye :
Little mirror of all the sky ! --
And then the after-song another tree
Held, and sent radiating back on me.

If no man had invented human word,
And a bird-song had been
The only way to utter what we mean,
What would we men have heard,
What understood, what seen,
Between the trills and pauses, in between
The singing and the silence of a bird?

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 03, 2023

47 sec read
280

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABAB CC DBDDBEE AADD FXGFGGF
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 808
Words 159
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 2, 7, 4, 7

Harold Monro

Harold Edward Monro was a British poet, the proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London which helped many famous poets bring their work before the public. more…

All Harold Monro poems | Harold Monro Books

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