A soft, blue vapour films the fields and woods;
Through shining heats, a thread, the roadway runs;
Far out in smoke, the white day sleeps and suns,
And faint and dim the city’s jar intrudes
Across these realms of summer’s solitudes,
Walled in by azure of the horizon’s rim:
Where the great sky, all arched and blurred and dim,
About this drowse and dreaming bends and broods.
Near in the heat a locust lilts and files,
A sheep-bell tinkles down along the grass,
And out by hill and valley, miles on miles,
With summer’s breath across its face half blurred,
Cradling this silence all unjarred, unstirred,
The river holds the whole world like a glass.