I wrap the blanket of the night

About me, fold on fold on fold—

And remember how as a child

Lost in the newness of the light

I first discovered what is old

From the night and the soft night wind.

For in the daytime all was new:

Moving in light and in the mind

All at once, thought, shape and hue.

Extravagant novelty too wild

For the new eyes of a child.

The night, the night alone is old

And showed me only what I knew,

Knew, yet never had been told;

A speech that from the darkness grew

Too deep for daily tongues to say,

Archaic dialogue of a few

Upon the sixth or the seventh day.

And shapes too simple for a place

In the day’s shrill complexity

Came and were more natural, more

Expected than my father’s face

Smiling across the open door,

More simple than the sanded floor

In unexplained simplicity.

A man now, gone with time so long—

My youth to myself grown fabulous

As an old land’s memories, a song

To trouble or to pleasure us—

I try to fit that world to this,

The hidden to the visible play,

Would have them both, would nothing miss,

Learn from the shepherd of the dark,

Here in the light, the paths to know

That thread the labyrinthine park,

And the great Roman roads that go

Striding across the untrodden day.