Death of the Bird

For every bird there is this last migration;

Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;

With a warm passage to the summer station

Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Year after year a speck on the map, divided

By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;

Season after season, sure and safely guided,

Going away she is also coming home.

And being home, memory becomes a passion

With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,

Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart’s possession

And exiled love mourning within the breast.

The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;

The palm tree casts a shadow not its own;

Down the long architrave of temple or palace

Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.

And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger;

That delicate voice, more urgent with despair,

Custom and fear constraining her no longer,

Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.

A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,

Single and frail, uncertain of her place,

Alone in the bright host of her companions,

Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space.

She feels it close now, the appointed season;

The invisible thread is broken as she flies;

Suddenly, without warning, without reason,

The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.

Try as she will, the trackless world delivers

No way, the wilderness of light no sign;

Immense,complex contours of hills and rivers

Mock her small wisdom with their vast design.

The darkness rises from the eastern valleys,

And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,

And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,

Receives the tiny burden of her death.

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Poems in English 

• The Messiah : A Sacred Eclogue poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Looking-Glass. : on Mrs. Pulteney poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Iliad: Book VI (excerpt) poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Fable of Dryope – Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 9, [v. 324-393] poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Dying Christian to His Soul poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Dunciad: Book IV poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Dunciad: Book III. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Dunciad: Book II. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Dunciad: Book I. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Challenge: A Court Ballad poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• The Basset-Table : An Eclogue poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Summer poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Summer – The Second Pastoral; or Alexis poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Summer – The Second Pastoral; or Alexis poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Spring – The First Pastoral ; or Damon poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Sound And Sense poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Song, by a Person of Quality poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Solitude: An Ode poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Solitude poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English
• Sappho to Phaon (Ovid Heroid XV) poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster by Poetry In English

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