Wonderment

by Siegfried Sassoon

Wonderment

Then a wind blew; 

And he who had forgot he moved 

Lonely amid the green and silver morning weather, 

Suddenly grew 

Aware of clouds and trees

Gleaming and white and shafted, shaken together 

And blown to music by the ruffling breeze. 

Like flush of wings 

The moment passed: he stood 

Dazzled with blossom in the swaying wood;

Then he remembered how, through all swift things, 

This mortal scene stands built of memories,— 

Shaped by the wise 

Who gazed in breathing wonderment, 

And left us their brave eyes

To light the ways they went. 

The Triumph 

When life was a cobweb of stars for Beauty who came

In the whisper of leaves or a bird's lone cry in the glen,

On dawn-lit hills and horizons girdled with flame

I sought for the triumph that troubles the faces of men.

With death in the terrible flickering gloom of the fight

I was cruel and fierce with despair; I was naked and bound;

was stricken: and Beauty returned through the shambles of night;

In the faces of men she returned; and their triumph I found. 

Solar Eclipse 

Observe these blue solemnities of sky

Offering for the academes of after-ages

A mythologic welkin freaked with white!

Listen : one tiny tinkling rivulet

Accentuates the super-sultry stillness

That drones on ripening landscapes which imply

Serene Parnassus plagued with amorous goats.

* * * *

Far down the vale Apollo has pursued

The noon-bedazzled nymph whose hunted heart

Holds but the trampling panic whence it fled,

And now the heavens are piled with darkening trouble

And counter-march of clouds that troop intent

Fire-crested into conflict.

Daphne turns

At the wood's edge in bronze and olive gloom:

Sickness assails the sun whose blazing disc

Dwindles : the Eden of those auburn slopes

Lours in the tarnished copper of eclipse.

Yet virgin in her god-impelled approach

To Graeco-Roman ravishment, she waits

While the unsated python slides to crush

Her lust-eluding fleetness. Envious Jove

Rumbles Olympus. All the classic world

Leans breathless toward the legend she creates.

From thunderous vapour smites the immortal beam . . .

Then, crowned with fangs of foliage, flames the god.

* * * *

' Apollo ! ' ... Up the autumn valley echoes

A hollow shout from nowhere. Daphne's limbs

Lapse into laureldom : green-shadowed flesh

Writhes aborescent; glamour obscures her gaze

With blind and bossed distortion. She escapes.