Sure on This Shining Night

Description of Elysium

There: far, friends: ours: dear dominion:

 

Whole health resides with peace,

Gladness and never harm,

There not time turning,

Nor fear of flower of snow

 

Where marbling water slides

No charm may halt of chill,

Air aisling the open acres,

And all the gracious trees

 

Spout up their standing fountains

Of wind-beloved green

And the blue conclaved mountains

Are grave guards

 

Stone and springing field

Wide one tenderness,

The unalterable hour

Smiles deathlessness:

 

No thing is there thinks:

Mind the witherer

Withers on the outward air:

We can not come there.

 

Sure on this shining night

Of star-made shadows round,

Kindness must watch for me

This side the ground.

 

The late year lies down the north.

All is healed, all is health.

High summer holds the earth.

Hearts all whole.

 

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone

Of shadows on the stars.

Now thorn bone bare

Silenced with iron the branch’s gullet:

Rattling merely on the air

Of hornleaved holly:

 

The stony mark where sand was by

The water of a nailèd foot:

The berry harder than the beak:

The hole beneath the dead oak root:

 

All now brought quiet

Through the latest throe

Quieted and ready and quiet:

Still not snow:

 

Still thorn bone bare

Iron in the silenced gully

Rattling only of the air

Through hornleaved holly.

 

-poem by James Agee