long light

It is a completely gorgeous day. After my theory class we went out to lunch, and then Jason and I took our reading to Riverside Park. He has a camp chair, which is clearly a worthwhile investment for reading outside. I sat on the ground with my back to a tree, getting mud all over my feet, and read Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House, which is crazy and glorious and a little like an acid trip through a seventeenth-century country house landscape, complete with evil lesbian nuns and tree bondage, floods and flowers and military gardens and agriculture and family history. Metaphysical poetry is kind of the greatest, and reading it outside on a day like today was almost unfairly perfect.

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on ...

—Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), 'You, Andrew Marvell', from Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952).