Classic Poem

The light of the winter afternoon
Had fainted, faded, and died;
The Lady Moss lay under the moon,
Silver from side to side.

A shadow fell on the fretted stone
That showed in the sleeping sedge;
A fox came down, alert, alone,
And crept to the water's edge.

His flanks were streaked with the moorland clay,
His snow-white tag was smeared;
They had run him hard in the hills all day
Till the last light disappeared.

He crouched on the flat grey stone and lapped
Where the brown loch-pebbles lie;
A wild-duck out of the sedges flapped,
And fled with a startled cry.

An owl in the distant fir-wood spoke;
His weird call carried across
A mile of the moorland, quavered and broke,
And died on the Lady Moss.

The fox on the flat stone drank his fill,
Then slow through the grasses slid,
And faded away on the open hill,
A shadow in shadow hid.

The tall reeds whispered a tiny tune
To the wind, and the wave his bride;
And the Lady Moss lay under the moon,
Silver and waste and wide.