'Slowly, silently...'

 Talking of Radio 3, one of its pleasing regular features is the Sunday poem, requested by a listener and read, in commendably straightforward style, by the presenter, Martin Handley. Often I miss it (it's aired some time before 8), but this morning I caught it, and it was one I hadn't heard (or read) since my boyhood, when it was in every children's anthology. I wonder if it still is, or is that strange archaism 'shoon' too much for today's kids? It's 'Silver' by Walter de la Mare, which I now see is a sonnet in length but not in shape, written in rhyming couplets and with no turn. A purely descriptive, entirely visual poem, it yet has something eerie and mysterious about it, as so often with De La Mare, and it is really very good. I love 'Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog'. 

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon;

This way, and that, she peers, and sees

Silver fruit upon silver trees;

One by one the casements catch

Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;

Couched in his kennel, like a log,

With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep

Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,

With silver claws and a silver eye;

And moveless fish in the water gleam,

By silver reeds in a silver stream.