Louisa Sarah Bevington

Midnight

THERE are sea and sky about me,
    And yet nothing sense can mark;
For a mist fills all the midnight
    Adding blindness to its dark.

There is not the faintest echo
    From the life of yesterday:
Not the vaguest stir foretelling
    Of a morrow on the way.

'Tis negation's hour of triumph
    In the absence of the sun;
'Tis the hour of endings, ended,
    Of beginnings, unbegun.

Yet the voice of awful silence
    Bids my waiting spirit hark;
There is action in the stillness,
    There is progress in the dark.

In the drift of things and forces
    Comes the better from the worse;
Swings the whole of Nature upward,
    Wakes, and thinks--a universe.

There will be more life to-morrow,
    And of life, more life that knows;
Though the sum of force be constant
    Yet the Living ever grows.

So we sing of evolution,
    And step strongly on our ways;
And we live through nights in patience
    And we learn the worth of days.

In the silence of murk midnight
    Is revealed to me this thing:
Nothing hinders, all enables
    Nature's vast awakening.