“To One Leaving for Sweden”

 

When soft and deep in Sweden’s skies

        Moons burn like golden fire,

And the nightingale thrills all the wood

        With exquisite desire,

Turn, turn upon thy pillow then,

        And think how dark and still

The firs wait for the rising moon

        On lonely Sehome hill.

 

Turn from thy song-bird’s ravishment—

        And think how mournfully

The night-hawk blows its lonely note

        By Puget’s lonely sea.

“To One Leaving for Sweden” as it appears in Higginson’s When the Birds Go North Again (1898).

A draft of “To One Leaving for Sweden,” courtesy of the Ella Higginson Papers, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Heritage Resources, Western Washington University, Bellingham Washington.

 

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