Prefatory Poem to my Brother's Sonnets

Midnight—in no midsummer tune

The breakers lash the shores:

The cuckoo of a joyless June

Is calling out of doors:

And thou hast vanish’d from thine own

To that which looks like rest,

True brother, only to be known

By those who love thee best.

Midnight—and joyless June gone by,

And from the deluged park

The cuckoo of a worse July

Is calling thro' the dark:

But thou art silent underground,

And o'er thee streams the rain,

True poet, surely to be found

When Truth is found again.

And now, in these unsummer'd skies

The summer bird is still,

Far off a phantom cuckoo cries

From out a phantom hill;

And thro' this midnight breaks the sun

Of sixty years away,

The light of days when life begun,

The days that seem to-day,

When all my griefs were shared with thee,

As all my hopes were thine—

As all thou wert was one with me,

May all thou art be mine!