| |
| IN the Dean’s porch a nest of clay | |
| With five small tenants may be seen; | |
| Five solemn faces, each as wise | |
| As if its owner were a Dean; | |
| |
| Five downy fledglings in a row, | 5 |
| Pack’d close, as in the antique pew | |
| The school-girls are whose foreheads clear | |
| At the Venite shine on you. | |
| |
| Day after day the swallows sit | |
| With scarce a stir, with scarce a sound, | 10 |
| But dreaming and digesting much | |
| They grow thus wise and soft and round: | |
| |
| They watch the Canons come to dine, | |
| And hear, the mullion-bars across, | |
| Over the fragrant fruit and wine | 15 |
| Deep talk of rood-screen and reredos. | |
| |
| Her hands with field-flowers drench’d, a child | |
| Leaps past in wind-blown dress and hair, | |
| The swallows turn their heads askew— | |
| Five judges deem that she is fair. | 20 |
| |
| Prelusive touches sound within, | |
| Straightway they recognize the sign, | |
| And, blandly nodding, they approve | |
| The minuet of Rubinstein. | |
| |
| They mark the cousins’ schoolboy talk, | 25 |
| (Male birds flown wide from minster bell), | |
| And blink at each broad term of art, | |
| Binomial or bicycle. | |
| |
| Ah! downy young ones, soft and warm, | |
| Doth such a stillness mask from sight | 30 |
| Such swiftness? can such peace conceal | |
| Passion and ecstasy of flight? | |
| |
| Yet somewhere ’mid your Eastern suns, | |
| Under a white Greek architrave | |
| At morn, or when the shaft of fire | 35 |
| Lies large upon the Indian wave, | |
| |
| A sense of something dear gone by | |
| Will stir, strange longings thrill the heart | |
| For a small world embower’d and close, | |
| Of which ye sometime were a part. | 40 |
| |
| The dew-drench’d flowers, the child’s glad eyes | |
| Your joy unhuman shall control, | |
| And in your wings a light and wind | |
| Shall move from the Maestro’s soul. | |
| |
