Wakeful, I saw my window sashed
With silver light before sunrise,
When, suddenly, the Phoenix flashed
A rainbow streak across the skies;

And it was gone before I said:
The Phoenix! In a book I read
The night before, I learnt to trace
That marvel to the happy place
It flies in, neither linde nor lawn
Of Earth, but in the Groves of Dawn.

There are so many things, the sight
Goes clean through as it were X-ray:
The finer things that hide in light,
Or in the heaven, that one might say,
Invisible, but we who know
How heedlessly the sight can go,
Employ the mind's eye but to find
That we are marvellously blind.

There are so many things that I
Could see that now seem to be hid,
I feel that they would crowd the sky
If I but lifted up a lid,
Or sang a song, or gave a shout,
That I would see them standing out;
But, as it is, what have I done
With all I've seen under the sun?

The Spring that comes before the Spring
And waits while boughs are thin and bare,
A deepened light, a quickening,
Annunciation in the air,
Delights me more, though cold and brief,
Than buds abounding, and the leaf.

And then the silver isles out far
On leaden edge of Eastern seas,
Beneath a dappled sky, which are
Our daily lost Atlantides,
A moment seen, and they are gone,
Bright archipelagos of dawn,
Are more to me, and solider,
Than the near hills which never stir.

But would there be this seeking for,
This wistful straining after things:
Islands surmised from lines of shore,
Unless within me there were wings,
Wings that can fly in, and belong
Only to realms revealed by song,
That bring those realms about their nest,
Merging the Seeker and the Quest?

They beat in faintly purple air;
Beneath them rise autumnal trees;
But Autumn's colours usher there
A Spring which is Eternity's,

A Spring which overtakes the fruit,
Till blossoms crown the fond pursuit.
And there is neither Time nor Space
Within that paradisal place;
Nor separating length and breadth;
With Love identical is Death;
And no more fearful in that grove
Is Death to those who dwell than Love.

Not in our East then, but in verse,
The far-seen flashing feather flies,
In Groves of Dawn whose wells immerse
The star that lights and leads the Wise.
But rare's the book that holds the Word
That moves the uncompanioned Bird
To shake the air, and, in its flight,
Rain down the variegated light
That makes all timeless, and transforms
Unmagical and ageing norms;
And, when it falls upon, renews
The full blue eye, the twinkling thews,
And makes again the heart of man
Ageless and epinikian.