A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire by Percy Shelly

 A Summer Evening Churchyard

The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere

Each vapour that obscured the sunset's ray,

And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair

In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:

Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,

Creep hand in hand from on obscurest glen.

They breathe their spells towards the departing day,

Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;

Light, sound and motion, own the potent sway,

Responding to the charm with its own mystery.

The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass

Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

Thou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles

Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,

Obey'st I in silence their sweet solemn spells,

Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,

Around whose lessening and invisible height

Gather among the stars the clouds of night.

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchers:

And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,

Half sense half thought, among the darkness stirs,

Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,

Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

 

Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild

And terrorless as this serenest night,

That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

Here could I hope, like some enquiring child

Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep