I love to rise ere gleams the tardy light, Winter’s pale dawn; and as warm fires illume, And cheerful tapers shine around the room, Through misty windows bend my musing sight, Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansions white, With shutters closed, peer faintly through the gloom That slow recedes; while yon gray spires assume, Rising from their dark pile, an added height By indistinctness given—then to decree The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold To friendship, or the Muse, or seek with glee Wisdom’s rich page. O hours more worth than gold, By whose blest use we lengthen life, and, free From drear decays of age, outlive the old!
This poem was originally published in Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace by Anna Seward (London, 1799) and is in the public domain.
Anna Seward (1747–1809), nicknamed the Swan of Lichfield, was a British Romantic poet who wrote elegies, odes, ballads, sonnets, and the well-received verse-novel Louisa (1784). Active in Lichfield’s literary community, she benefitted from her clergyman father’s progressive views on female education. She was a prodigious correspondent and was seen as an authority on English literature by contemporaries such as Samuel Johnson, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott, the latter of whom edited her posthumously published Poetical Works in three volumes (1810).
Art & Theology 