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Christmas at the hall

Chapter 38: Lines to the Sun.
By T. J. Terrington
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Poetry

About This Book

This collection presents a sequence of poems built around a framing Christmas family gathering that links diverse shorter pieces; it moves between domestic sketches, seasonal and religious meditations, elegies and occasional tributes. Maritime landscapes and coastal scenes appear alongside reflective night musings, sonnets and ballads, while personal aspiration toward the poetic calling recurs in a few direct addresses. The verse varies in metre and tone, alternating descriptive natural imagery, moral and devotional reflection, and narrative fragments, producing an earnest, uneven but sincere portrait of a nineteenth-century poet testing his powers across themes of home, nature, loss, and hope.

Lines to the Sun.

Bright regent of ether,
Great monarch of day,
Whose sceptre of splendour
Drives darkness away;
Thou art the restorer
Of life on the earth,
And givest its beauty
Renewal of birth.
From soft dewy slumber,
Mid darkness and night,
Each flower opes its eyelid
To gaze on thy light.
The dew-drops of morning,
Which spangle the vale,
To honour thy coming
As incense exhale.
Gay birds of the woodland
Aroused by thy ray,
To musical breezes
Attune the sweet lay.
The trees of the forest
Rejoice in thy beams,
That glance like bright silver
Along the clear streams.
How splendid all nature
Beneath thy glad reign,
In light and in glory,
O’er land and o’er main.
E’en man, the earth’s ruler,
Awaits thy command;
His fetters of slumber
Are broke by thy hand.
From sleep he ariseth
To toil and to care,
Till evening’s rich lustre
Hath vanished from air.
Yet art thou but agent,—
The servant of him
Who gave thee thy brightness,
And polished thy beam.
Thy glory is darkness;
Thy splendour but night;
To Him, thy Creator,
Who “dwelleth in light.”