THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
by: Robert Louis Stevenson
- NAKED house, a naked moor,
- A shivering pool before the door,
- A garden bare of flowers and fruit
- And poplars at the garden foot:
- Such is the place that I live in,
- Bleak without and bare within.
-
- Yet shall your ragged moor receive
- The incomparable pomp of eve,
- And the cold glories of dawn
- Behind your shivering trees be drawn;
- And when the wind from place to place
- Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,
- Your garden gloom and gleam again,
- With leaping sun, with glancing rain.
- Here shall the wizard moon ascend
- The heavens, in the crimson end
- Of day's declining splendour; here
- The army of the stars appear.
- The neighbor hollows dry or wet,
- Spring shall with tender flowers beset;
- And oft the morning muser see
- Larks rising from the broomy lea,
- And every fairy wheel and thread
- Of cobweb dew-bediamonded.
- When daisies go, shall winter time
- Silver the simple grass with rime;
- Autumnal frosts enchant the pool
- And make the cart-ruts beautiful;
- And when snow-bright the moor expands,
- How shall your children clap their hands!
- To make this earth our hermitage,
- A cheerful and a changeful page,
- God's bright and intricate device
- Of days and seasons doth suffice.
'The House Beautiful' is reprinted
from An Anthology of Modern Verse. Ed. A. Methuen. London:
Methuen & Co., 1921. |
MORE POEMS BY STEVENSON |
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