Samuel Palmer ‘Coming from Evening Church’ 1830
Samuel Palmer’s
‘Coming from Evening Church’
Charles Causley
The heaven-reflecting, usual moon
Scarred by thin branched, flows between
The simple sky, its light half-gone,
The evening hills of risen green.
Safely below the mountain crest
A little clench of sheep holds fast.
The lean spire hovers like a mast
Over its hulk of leaves and moss
And those who, locked within a dream,
Make between church and cot their way
Beside the secret-springing stream
That turns towards an unknown sea;
and there is neither night nor day,
Sorrow nor pain, eternally.
Samuel Palmer ‘A Dream in the Apennine’ exhibited 1864
Charles Causley was born in Launceston, Cornwall. In 1967 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry: he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1986vhe was appointed CBE. His updated Collected Poems was published by Macmillan in 1992.
Samuel Palmer ‘The Gleaning Field’ c.1833