Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

Lines for a Sun-Dial

Alfred Noyes

1880 –

1958

With shadowy pen I write,
Till time be done,
Good news of some strange light,
Some far off sun.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

The author of many collections of poetry, Alfred Noyes was highly influenced by the Romantic movement.

Themes

About this Poem

“Lines for a Sun-Dial” was included in Alfred Noyes’s The New Morning (Frederick A. Stokes, 1907). About Noyes’s shorter poems, poet Edward Davison writes in his essay “The Poetry of Alfred Noyes,” published in The English Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4 (April 1926), “His verse, even when, as in The Torch Bearers, it deals with the very quality and range of the human intellect in its finest in stances, is never intellectual. It means just what it says and no more. We cannot plunge through the superficial meaning into depth after depth of parallel meaning, as in the poems of Walter de la Mare and W. B. Yeats. In the strictest sense of the word Alfred Noyes is a ‘simple’ poet. Perhaps ‘elementary’ would be a better word. He is to be compared with Longfellow rather than with Wordsworth, both simple poets in the superficial sense of the word. But to say that his poetry is shallow is not to say that the best of it is shallow in feeling. It is only shallow in the sense that it is obvious. One does not return to Noyes’s poetry with the knowledge that each new reading will increase our sense of its significance. Its values are face values; its music that of a ballad, not of a madrigal.”

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

The Highwayman

Part I

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

Alfred Noyes

1906

Poems

Page submenu block

Lines for a Sun-Dial

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up