Song
WE sail toward evening’s lonely star
That trembles in the tender blue;
One single cloud, a dusky bar,
Burnt with dull carmine through and through,
Slow smouldering in the summer sky,
Lies low along the fading west.
How sweet to watch its splendors die,
Wave-cradled thus and wind-caressed!
The soft breeze freshens, leaps the spray
To kiss our cheeks, with sudden cheer;
Upon the dark edge of the bay
Lighthouses kindle, far and near,
And through the warm deeps of the sky
Steal faint star-clusters, while we rest
In deep refreshment, thou and I,
Wave-cradled thus and wind-caressed.
How like a dream are earth and heaven,
Star-beam and darkness, sky and sea;
Thy face, pale in the shadowy even,
Thy quiet eyes that gaze on me!
O realize the moment’s charm,
Thou dearest! we are at life’s best,
Folded in God’s encircling arm,
Wave-cradled thus and wind-caressed.
poem by Celia Thaxter
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Related quotes
Improvisations: Light And Snow: 15
The music of the morning is red and warm;
Snow lies against the walls;
And on the sloping roof in the yellow sunlight
Pigeons huddle against the wind.
The music of evening is attenuated and thin —
The moon seen through a wave by a mermaid;
The crying of a violin.
Far down there, far down where the river turns to the west,
The delicate lights begin to twinkle
On the dusky arches of the bridge:
In the green sky a long cloud,
A smouldering wave of smoky crimson,
Breaks in the freezing wind: and above it, unabashed,
Remote, untouched, fierly palpitant,
Sings the first star.
poem by Conrad Potter Aiken
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A Flower's Song
Star! Star, why dost thou shine
Each night upon my brow?
Why dost thou make me dream the dreams
That I am dreaming now?
Star! Star, thy home is high --
I am of humble birth;
Thy feet walk shining o'er the sky,
Mine, only on the earth.
Star! Star, why make me dream?
My dreams are all untrue;
And why is sorrow dark for me
And heaven bright for you?
Star! Star, oh, hide thy ray,
And take it off my face;
Within my lowly home I stay,
Thou, in thy lofty place.
Star! Star, and still I dream,
Along thy light afar
I seem to soar until I seem
To be, like you, a star.
poem by Abram Joseph Ryan
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Childless
The Son thou sentest forth is now a Thought-
A Dream. To all but thee he is as nought
As if he had gone back into the same
Bosom that bare him. Oh, thou grey pale Dame,
With eyes so wan and wide, what! knowest thou where
Thy Dream is such a thing as doth up-bear
The earth out of its wormy place? I' the air
Dost see the very fashion of the stone
That hath his face for clay? Deep, deep, hast found
The texture of that single weight of ground
Which to each mole and mark that thou hast known
Is special burden? Nay, her face is mild
And sweet. In Heaven the evening star is fair,
And there the mother looketh for her child.
poem by Sydney Thompson Dobell
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The Gifts of God
THE LIGHT that fills thy house at morn,
Thou canst not for thyself retain;
But all who with thee here are born,
It bids to share an equal gain.
The wind that blows thy ship along,
Her swelling sails cannot confine;
Alike to all the gales belong,
Nor canst thou claim a breath as thine.
The earth, the green out-spreading earth,
Why hast thou fenced it off from me?
Hadst thou than I a nobler birth,
Who callest thine a gift so free?
The wave, the blue encircling wave,
No chains can bind, no fetters hold;
Its thunders tell of Him who gave
What none can ever buy for gold.
poem by Jones Very
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Sonnet. The lake and star
The mountain lake, o'ershadowed by the hills,
May still gaze heavenward on the evening star,
Whose distant light its dark recesses fills,
Though boundless distance must divide them far;
Still may the lake the star's bright image bear,
Still may the star, from its blue ether dome,
Shower down its silver beams across the gloom,
And light the wave that wanders darkly there.
Star of my life! thus do I turn to thee
Amid the shadows that above me roll;
Thus from thy distant sphere thou shinest on me;
Thus does thine image float upon my soul,
Through the wide space that must our lives dissever
Far as the lake and star, ah me! forever.
poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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The Witch Of Mull
'Witch of Mull, the strangers here
Come to wreak their vengeance drear:
Call the wind and call the wrack;
Drown them, drive them, beat them back!'
Wind and wave are wild in Morvern.
'Gormla, speed! Their magic powers
Calm the deep and baffle ours:
Aid us, thou who know'st full well
Strongest brew and blackest spell!'
Wind and wave are wild in Morvern.
Magpies twelve upon the mast
Call aloud to wave and blast'
'Bonnily on Morvern shore
Shall we feast when all is o'er!'
Wind and wave are wild in Morvern.
Harried seaward, fast they flee
Wind and wrack and raging sea:
Hard and grey the rocks before, -
Hard their bed on Morvern shore!
Wind and wave are wild in Morvern.
Bonny dead men on the sand, -
Dead and drowned on Morvern strand, -
Broken mast and battered hull, -
Glad the witches are in Mull!
Wind and wave are wild in Morvern.
poem by Cicely Fox Smith
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Evening Star
(Written by Barry and Maurice Gibb)
If you never rode West of the Arizona border
You can turn the other way boy but you never get far
You be living a lie if you wanna see the wonders of the age
You must follow the evening star.
Chorus:
Evening star
Shine a little Heaven
On a stranger with no dream
Where you are.
You can see the loneliness I mean and if I gotta fight
I can never play somebody else's game
I can follow the evening star
Starlight, you never need somebody else's name
If you follow the evening star.
Have you ever known a sunset when the sky's on fire
How you end another day boy you've been searching too far
Like the desert I rode on any memory is lost in the restless wind
I just lie beneath the evening star.
Chorus:
Evening star
Shine a little Heaven
On a stranger with no dream
Where you are.
Have you ever held a woman in the California moonlight
Put your money on a good night if you never been there
It's a sight for sore eyes if you wanna see the wonders of the age
Making love beneath the evening star.
Chorus
Evening star
Shine a little Heaven
on a stranger with no dream
Where you are.
You can see the loneliness I mean and if I gotta fight
I will never play somebody else's game
I can follow the evening star
Starlight, you never need somebody else's name
If you follow the evening star...
song performed by by Kenny Rogers
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Woodman And The Nightingale
A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody;--
And as a vale is watered by a flood,
Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness—as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie
Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,
The singing of that happy nightingale
In this sweet forest, from the golden close
Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness;
The folded roses and the violets pale
Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss
Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear
Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness
Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere
And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,
And every wind of the mute atmosphere,
And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,
And every silver moth fresh from the grave
Which is its cradle—ever from below
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,
To be consumed within the purest glow
Of one serene and unapproached star,
As if it were a lamp of earthly light,
Unconscious, as some human lovers are,
Itself how low, how high beyond all height
The heaven where it would perish!—and every form
That worshipped in the temple of the night
Was awed into delight, and by the charm
Girt as with an interminable zone,
Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm
Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion
Out of their dreams; harmony became love
In every soul but one.
...
And so this man returned with axe and saw
At evening close from killing the tall treen,
The soul of whom by Nature’s gentle law
Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green
The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,
Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene
With jagged leaves,—and from the forest tops
Singing the winds to sleep—or weeping oft
Fast showers of aereal water-drops
Into their mother’s bosom, sweet and soft,
Nature’s pure tears which have no bitterness;--
Around the cradles of the birds aloft
They spread themselves into the loveliness
Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers
Hang like moist clouds:—or, where high branches kiss,
Make a green space among the silent bowers,
Like a vast fane in a metropolis,
Surrounded by the columns and the towers
All overwrought with branch-like traceries
In which there is religion—and the mute
Persuasion of unkindled melodies,
Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute
Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast
Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,
Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed
To such brief unison as on the brain
One tone, which never can recur, has cast,
One accent never to return again.
...
The world is full of Woodmen who expel
Love’s gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell.
poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Dire Manhattan #3
Walking aimlessly
Past the sleeping terrain
Of Manhattan
At 1: 30 in the morning,
Thinking of a place
Where I could crash and burn.
The wind cradled me
And caressed my chaffed lips.
The cars were scant
And the smell of forgotten love
Flourished.
Alone, fretting in the dark
Underneath the stark abyss,
I was submerged in the pretentious
Moon-glazed concrete of quagmire.
I will never be the same
Underneath the Manhattan skies.
poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr
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The Visitant
1
A cloud moved close. The bulk of the wind shifted.
A tree swayed over water.
A voice said:
Stay. Stay by the slip-ooze. Stay.
Dearest tree, I said, may I rest here?
A ripple made a soft reply.
I waited, alert as a dog.
The leech clinging to a stone waited;
And the crab, the quiet breather.
2
Slow, slow as a fish she came,
Slow as a fish coming forward,
Swaying in a long wave;
Her skirts not touching a leaf,
Her white arms reaching towards me.
She came without sound,
Without brushing the wet stones,
In the soft dark of early evening,
She came,
The wind in her hair,
The moon beginning.
3
I woke in the first of morning.
Staring at a tree, I felt the pulse of a stone.
Where’s she now, I kept saying.
Where’s she now, the mountain’s downy girl?
But the bright day had no answer.
A wind stirred in a web of appleworms;
The tree, the close willow, swayed.
poem by Theodore Roethke
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Freedom Or Queen
LAND where the banners wave last in the sun,
Blazoned with star-clusters, many in one,
Floating o'er prairie and mountain and sea;
Hark! 't is the voice of thy children to thee!
Here at thine altar our vows we renew
Still in thy cause to be loyal and true,--
True to thy flag on the field and the wave,
Living to honor it, dying to save!
Mother of heroes! if perfidy's blight
Fall on a star in thy garland of light,
Sound but one bugle-blast! Lo! at the sign
Armies all panoplied wheel into line!
Hope of the world! thou'hast broken its chains,--
Wear thy bright arms while a tyrant remains,
Stand for the right till the nations shall own
Freedom their sovereign, with Law for her throne!
Freedom! sweet Freedom! our voices resound,
Queen by God's blessing, unsceptred, uncrowned!
Freedom, sweet Freedom, our pulses repeat,
Warm with her life-blood, as long as they beat!
Fold the broad banner-stripes over her breast,--
Crown her with star-jewels Queen of the West!
Earth for her heritage, God for her friend,
She shall reign over us, world without end!
poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Washington. On Huntington's picture of Washington crossing the Alleghany in early life
More proudly on thy winding course,
Dark Alleghany! flow;
The noblest burden thou couldst bear
Is on thy waters now.
But calm be every turbid wave,
And hushed be wind and storm:
There lies a Nation's destiny
Within that gallant form.
A spirit that shall stem a tide
More deep and dark than thine;
That on a night of War shall bid
The star of Victory shine.
A spirit that through coming time
Shall bear a hallowed name;
The glory of old conquerors
Shall pale before his fame.
And young Ambition on his course
Shall turn his eagle eye;
And men invoke his sainted shade
In threat'ning anarchy.
No baleful meteor shall he be,
To dazzle from afar;
But in the firmament of Fame
A fixed, a polar star!
poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Beauty's Metempsychosis
That beauty such as thine
Can die indeed,
Were ordinance too wantonly malign:
No wit may reconcile so cold a creed
With beauty such as thine.
From wave and star and flower
Some effluence rare
Was lent thee, a divine but transient dower:
Thou yield'st it back from eyes and lips and hair
To wave and star and flower.
Shouldst thou to-morrow die,
Thou still shalt be
Found in the rose and met in all the sky:
And from the ocean's heart shalt sing to me,
Shouldst thou to-morrow die.
poem by William Watson
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Stanzas to the Po
River, that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me;
What if thy deep and ample stream should be
A mirror of my heart, where she may read
The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee,
Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed!
What do I say -a mirror of my heart?
Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong?
Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art were my passions long.
Time may have somewhat tamed them, -not for ever;
Thou overflow'st thy banks, and not for aye
The bosom overboils, congenial river!
Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away.
But left long wrecks behind, and now again,
Born in our old unchanged career, we move;
Thou tendest wildly onwards to the main,
And I -to loving one I should not love.
The current I behold will sweep beneath
Her native walls and murmur at her feet;
Her eyes will look on thee, when she shall breathe
The twilight air, unharmed by summer's heat.
She will look on thee, -I have looked on thee,
Full of that thought; and, from that moment, ne'er
Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see,
Without the inseparable sigh for her!
Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream, -
Yes! they will meet the wave I gaze on now:
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream,
That happy wave repass me in its flow!
The wave that bears my tears returns no more:
Will she return by whom that wave shall sweep?
Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore,
I by thy source, she by the dark-blue deep.
But that which keepeth us apart is not
Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth,
But the distraction of a various lot,
As various as the climates of our birth.
A stranger loves the lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the black wind that chills the polar flood.
My blood is all meridian; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again of love, -at least of thee.
'Tis vain to struggle -let me perish young -
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved;
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved.
poem by Byron (1819)
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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That one star
Remember that summer, i used to lie down on the grass.
In the countryside, i used to watch the stars every night.
Were always lots of stars in the dark blue sky,
Were always rich lightened in the deep sky.
And there was only one star that i liked.
Was in different places everyday night,
But i would find it every time.
And there was one special star that i wondered.
Was the lightest one in my eyes,
But no one else could find it.
That one star stayed in my memories,
That one star is still in my mind.
Too far to catch it,
Too close to run away from it.
Every night it would appear in the sky.
Every day it would disappear in the light.
Someday i couldn't wait for the night.
Then i used to pray for the night to come quickly.
Still i see that one star,
Even on the another side of the earth.
Still i see that one star,
Even in the middle of my dream.
That one star never left me.
That one star never came close.
Just like in the beginning,
Same in the end.
That one star.
That one star.
poem by Sukhee Bukhbat
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The Lie Goodbye
When thou wave to me and say Goodbye
Thou wave in me thy sweet memory
And each day I awake, thou say Hi
With each day, I think with ecstasy…
In my heart thou wilt never cease
and there thou be, my happiness and peace
so when thou wave and say Goodbye
thou wave thy soul in me that shall never die
do not fear the words Goodbye
they art words which always lie
for there is no goodbye as long we live
those memories we keep and always give…
poem by Kevin Michael Murphy
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A Wave of the Sea
I am a wave of the sea
And the foam of the wave
And the wind of the foam
And the wings of the wind.
My soul’s in the salt of the sea
In the weight of the wave
In the bubbles of foam
In the ways of the wind.
My gift is the depth of the sea
The strength of the wave
The lightness of foam
The speed of the wind.
poem by by unknown author
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Composed By The Sea-Side, Near Calais, August 1802
FAIR Star of evening, Splendour of the west,
Star of my Country!--on the horizon's brink
Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink
On England's bosom; yet well pleased to rest,
Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest
Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think,
Should'st be my Country's emblem; and should'st wink,
Bright Star! with laughter on her banners, drest
In thy fresh beauty. There! that dusky spot
Beneath thee, that is England; there she lies.
Blessings be on you both! one hope, one lot,
One life, one glory!--I, with many a fear
For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs,
Among men who do not love her, linger here.
poem by William Wordsworth
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Evening Star
If you never rode west of the arizona border
You can turn the other way boy, but youll never get far
You be living a lie
If you wanna see the wonders of the age you must follow the evening star
Evening star
Shine a little heaven on the stranger with no dream
Where you are you can see the loneliness I mean
And if I gotta fight I will never play somebodys elses game
I can follow the evening star
Starlight - you never need somebody elses name
If you follow the evening star
Have you ever know a sunset when the skys on fire
How you end another day boy
You been seaching to far
Like the desert I rode on any memory is lost in the restless wind
I just lie beneath the evening star
Evening star
Shine a little heaven on a stranger with no dream
Where you are you can see the loneliness I mean
And if I gotta fight I will never play somebodys elses game
I can follow the evening star
Starlight - you never need somebodys elses name
If you follow the evening star
Have you ever held a woman in the california moonlight
Put your money on a good night
If you never been there its a sight for sore eyes
If you wanna see the wonders of the age
Making love beneath the evening star
Evening star
Shine a little heaven on a stranger with no dream
Where you are you can see the loneliness I mean
And if I gotta fight I will never play somebody elses game
I can follow the evening star
Starlight - you never need somebody elses name
If you follow the evening star
song performed by by Bee Gees
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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To A Star
Sweet star, which gleaming o'er the darksome scene
Through fleecy clouds of silvery radiance fliest,
Spanglet of light on evening's shadowy veil,
Which shrouds the day-beam from the waveless lake,
Lighting the hour of sacred love; more sweet
Than the expiring morn-star’s paly fires:--
Sweet star! When wearied Nature sinks to sleep,
And all is hushed,--all, save the voice of Love,
Whose broken murmurings swell the balmy blast
Of soft Favonius, which at intervals
Sighs in the ear of stillness, art thou aught but
Lulling the slaves of interest to repose
With that mild, pitying gaze? Oh, I would look
In thy dear beam till every bond of sense
Became enamoured--
poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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