The testament of beauty : a poem in four books / by Robert Bridges.

  • Robert Bridges
Date:
[1930]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The testament of beauty : a poem in four books / by Robert Bridges. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/210 page 5
    and that without thine ear, sound would hav no report, Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee any better melody in the April woods at dawn than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake o night in his comfortless attic, might perchance be aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch ? Now since the thoughtless birds not only act and enjoy this music, but to their offspring teach it with care, handing on those small folk-songs from father to son in such faithful tradition that they are familiar unchanging to the changeful generations of men— and year by year, listening to himself the nightingale as amorous of his art as of his brooding mate practiseth every phrase of his espousal lay, and still provoketh envy of the lesser songsters with the same notes that woke poetic eloquence alike in Sophocles and the sick heart of Keats— see then how deeply seated is the urgence whereto Bach and Mozart obey’d, or those other minstrels who pioneer’d for us on the marches of heav’n and paid no heed to wars that swept the world around, nor in their homes were more troubled by cannon-roar than late the small birds wer, that nested and carol’d upon the devastated battlefields of France.
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