文本歌词

Frost at Midnight - Richard Burton
The Frost performs it's secret ministry
Unhelped by any wind
The owlet's cry
Came loud and hark again loud as before
The inmates of my cottage all at rest
Have left me to that solitude which suits
Abstruser musings save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully
'Tis calm indeed so calm that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness
Sea hill and wood
This populous village
Sea and hill and wood
With all the numberless goings on of life
Inaudible as dreams the thin blue flame
Lies on my low burnt fire and quivers not
Only that film which fluttered on the grate
Still flutters there the sole unquiet thing
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live
Making it a companionable form
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself
And makes a toy of Thought
But O how oft
How oft at school with most believing mind
Presageful have I gazed upon the bars
To watch that fluttering stranger and as oft
With unclosed lids already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth place and the old church tower
Whose bells the poor man's only music rang
From morn to evening all the hot Fair day
So sweetly that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come
So gazed I till the soothing things
I dreamt
Lulled me to sleep and sleep prolonged my dreams
And so I brooded all the following morn
Awed by the stern preceptor's face mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book
Save if the door half opened and
I snatched
A hasty glance and still my heart leaped up
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face
Townsman or aunt or sister more beloved
My play mate when we both were clothed alike
Dear Babe that sleepest cradled by my side
Whose gentle breathings heard in this deep calm
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought
My babe so beautiful it thrills my heart
With tender gladness thus to look at thee
And think that thou shall learn far other lore
And in far other scenes
For I was reared
In the great city pent 'mid cloisters dim
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars
But thou my babe shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain and beneath the clouds
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language which thy God
Utters who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all and all things in himself
Great universal Teacher he shall mould
Thy spirit and by giving make it ask
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple tree while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun thaw
Whether the eave drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon