22 T. C. D.

Written by William Wilkins in c1878 and reprinted in Trinity News on 15 April 2008, with this note:

The author, William Wilkins (Sch 1876, BA 1878, MA 1881), was the first student to combine mathematics with modern literature for his degree, which he did in 1878. This poem was originally published in the college periodical Kottabos and later reprinted in the compilation Echoes from Kottabos (ed RY Tyrell, 1906).

22 T. C. D.

UP here I sleep in the hawthorn scent,
It swims through my windows from lawn to lawn
While June’s first nights with their deep content
Possess my spirit from dusk to dawn.

I lying here, alone, a king,
In the centre of pleasances green and sweet;
Hearing the tree-tops murmuring,
Hearing the far-away sounds of the street.

With only to lean o’er the garden-bed,
To see steadfast Jupiter shine in the south,
To see Arcturus hang overhead,
And the stillness of spars o’er the river-mouth.

Eastward, westward, spread in the dark
An acre of grass, an acre of daisies:
Northward, a square; to the south, a park;
Mine is the midmost of pleasant places.

Hence I can see, as the midnight wears,
The first blue tides of the morning steal
Between the shores of cloud, among fleets of stars,
Blanching the coigns of the Campanile,

And all the divine repose that looms
Through the College Courts as the sweet hours go;
Palatial piles and their cloister’d glooms,
And dormer, and terrace, and portico.

While the sea-like city is laid asleep,
No motion or sound in its mountain heights
Of dark, vast waves,——or its furrows deep,
Sown with the lines of unnumber’d lights,

Till the blue turns grey, and the grey turns gold,
And the sea and land taste the new day’s breath;
And I hear the joys of the young man told
By the wakening birds in the boughs beneath.

And thus in the city, I scarcely sigh
For hollows that eglantines perfume,
And speedwells make like an undersky
Peering through clouds of chestnut bloom.

For I know my part in the treasure-trove
Of the glad green meads where June winds roam,
As I knew the looks of my fair first love,
As I know the shapes of our hills at home.

And so I sleep in the hawthorn scent
That dwells with me here like a haunting passion,
And so in the city I wait content
While the time draws on to the long vacation.

W. W.