Cirrus@Austlit

Epigraph:

There’s music in the sighing of a reed;

There’s music in the gushing of a rill;

There’s music in all things, if men had ears:

Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.—George Gordon Bryon, Don Juan, Canto XV

Lord I am watching watching through the night

And listening for the heavenly harmonies

Guessing and wondering at great mysteries ...—John Shaw Neilson, aged twenty-five, “The Earth Born”

Good fellow of the Song

Be not too dismal—it is you and I

And a few others lift the world along.—John Shaw Neilson, aged fifty-five, “Speech to a Rhymer”

... a poet in defeat, entirely undefeated.—Geoffrey Grigson, on John Clare