Robert Bridges was born in 1844 and educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After traveling extensively, he studied medicine in London and practiced until 1882. Most of his poems, like his occasional plays, are classical in tone as well as treatment. He was appointed poet laureate in 1913, following Alfred Austin. His command of the secrets of rhythm and a subtle versification give his lines a firm delicacy and beauty of pattern.

Winter Nightfall

The day begins to droop,--

Its course is done:

But nothing tells the place

Of the setting sun.

The hazy darkness deepens,

And up the lane

You may hear, but cannot see,

The homing wain.

An engine pants and hums

In the farm hard by:

Its lowering smoke is lost

In the lowering sky.

The soaking branches drip,

And all night through

The dropping will not cease

In the avenue.

A tall man there in the house

Must keep his chair:

He knows he will never again

Breathe the spring air:

His heart is worn with work;

He is giddy and sick

If he rise to go as far

As the nearest rick:

He thinks of his morn of life,

His hale, strong years;

And braves as he may the night

Of darkness and tears.

Nightingales

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,

And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom

Ye learn your song:

Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,

Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air

Bloom the year long!

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:

Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,

A throe of the heart,

Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,

No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,

For all our art.

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men

We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,

As night is withdrawn

From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,

Dream, while the innumerable choir of day

Welcome the dawn.

1. An elegy is a type of lyric poem of mourning or lamentation for the dead. Usually it expresses sorrow over the death of someone the poet admired or loved or respected; sometimes it simply mourns the passing of all life and beauty.
2. The elegy, a type of lyric poem, is usually a formal lament for someone's death. The term elegy is sometimes used more widely. In antiquity it referred to anything written in elegiac meter, which consisted of alternating lines of pentameter and hexameter
3. Lyric poetry -- which takes its name from songs accompanied by the lyre -- is distinguished from dramatic and narrative poetry. Although the boundaries are flexible, most lyric poems are fairly short, and are often personal. Examples include the sonnet, the elegy and the ode.
4. The category can include the threnody, the monody, the dirge, and the pastoral elegy. The last of these, an important Renaissance form, combines elements of the verse pastoral with the elegiac subject.
5. One of the most famous examples of the genre in English, Milton's Lycidas, is properly a pastoral elegy. Other well-known English pastoral poems from the Renaissance are Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and Sidney's Arcadia. As Arcadia suggests, although the pastoral is traditionally lyric poetry, it needn't be. Shakespeare's As You Like It includes pastoral elements, and Arcadia is sometimes considered a pastoral romance.
6. Other terms often used as synonyms for pastoral are idyll, eclogue, and bucolic poetry. The georgic often shares many characteristics with pastoral, but it's worth keeping them separate.

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