Wild Swans (verse)
Coffin, Robert P. Tristram
Wild Swan The afternoon was one that might have merged In nebulae of afternoons as bright Had not three wild swans made it memorable And touched it so immortally with white. Slowly they went, a...
...They were a ritual made visible...
...Blossoms of wild apples far too fair To bear a fruit to sweeten any tongue, Wild honeycomb, too like a litany To be but lovely words that lips have sung...
...Slowly they went, a law and harmony Unto themselves alone, they rose and fell Untouched by any circumstance of day...
...ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN...
...They were the kind of sudden loveliness The middle-ages dreamed in those three birds, Alpha and Omega, end and birth, And sight of Zion white beyond all words, The haunting beauty that might rend the veil And show the lips of joy on those of pain, The light that visits eyes once and for all And may not ever shine on life again...
...So rapt and all so lost as these long wings To all the common use of common days Were the tall men walled up close in stone Who spent their pith in their Creator's praise...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 13
