Said a people to a poet - "Go out from among us straightway!
While we are thinking earthly things, thou singest of divine.
There's a little fair brown nightingale, who, sitting in the gateways
Makes fitter music to our ears than any song of thine!"
The poet went out weeping-the nightingale ceased chanting;
"Now, wherefore, O thou nightingale, is all thy sweetness done?"
I cannot sing my earthly things, the heavenly poet wanting,
Whose highest harmony includes the lowest under sun."
The poet went out weeping, - and died abroad, bereft there -
The bird flew to his grave and died, amid a thousand wails: -
And, when I last came by the place, I swear the music left there
Was only of the poet's song, and not the nightingale's.
Did you like this poem? Why not receive free classic poems by email? SUBSCRIBE
• A Child Asleep
• A Dead Rose
• A Man's Requirements
• Musical Instrument
• A Sea-Side Walk
• A Thought For A Lonely Death-Bed
• Adequacy
• An Apprehension
• Change Upon Change
• Cheerfulness Taught By Reason
• Comfort
• Consolation
• De Profundis
• Discontent
• Exaggeration
• Futurity
• Grief
• How Do I Love Thee?
• Insufficiency
• Irreparableness
• Lord Walter's Wife
• Minstrelsy
• Pain In Pleasure
• Past And Future
• Patience Taught By Nature
• Perplexed Music
• Substitution
• Tears
• The Autumn
• The Best Thing In The World
• The Deserted Garden
• The House Of Clouds
• The Lady's Yes
• The Landing of Pilgrim Fathers
• The Look
• The Meaning Of The Look
• The Poet And The Bird
• The Prisoner
• The Seraph and Poet
• The Soul's Expression
• The Two Sayings
• The Weakest Thing
• To Flush, My Dog
• Work
• Work And Contemplation
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Frost
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth
Elizabeth Barrett Browning The Poet And The Bird - Poem Lyrics - Elizabeth Barrett Browning - The Poet And The Bird
