I die; but when the grave shall press
The heart so long endeared to thee,
When earthly cares no more distress
And earthly joys are nought to me,
Weep not, but think that I have passed
Before thee o'er a sea of gloom,
Have anchored safe, and rest at last
Where tears and mourning cannot come.
'Tis I should weep to leave thee here,
On that dark ocean, sailing drear,
With storms around and fears before
And no kind light to point the shore.
But long or short though life may be
'Tis nothing to eternity;
We part below to meet on high
Where blissful ages never die.
Tell me, tell me, smiling child,
What the past is like to thee?
"An autumn evening soft and mild
With a wind that sighs mournfully."
Tell me, what is the present hour?
"A green and flowery spray
Where a young bird sits gathering its power
To mount and fly away."
And what is the future, happy one?
"A sea beneath a cloudless sun;
A mighty, glorious, dazzling sea
Stretching into infinity."
"The Night Wind"
In summers mellow midnight
A cloudless moon shone through
Our open parlour window
And rosetrees wet with dew.
I sat in silent musing-
The soft wind waved my hair;
It told me heaven was glorious
And sleeping earth was fair.
I needed not it's breathing
To bring such thoughts to me
But still I whispered lowly
"How dark the woods will be!
The thick leaves in my murmur
Are rustling like a dream,
And all their myriad voices
Instinct with spirit seem."
I said: "Go gentle singer,
Thy wooing voice is kind,
But do not think its music
Has power to reach my mind.
Play with the scented flower,
The young tree's supple bough-
And leave my human feelings
In their own course to flow."
The wanderer would not leave me;
Its kiss grew warmer still-
"Oh come," it sighed so sweetly,
"I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.
Have we not been from childhood friends?
Have I not loved thee long?
As long as thou hast loved the night
Whose silence wakes my song.
And when thy heart is laid at rest
Beneath the church-yard stone
I shall have time enough to mourn
And thou to be alone."
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And Summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then, of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can defence,
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held:
Then, being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,"
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feelst it cold.
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair, which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting Time leads Summer on
To hideous Winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then, were not Summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distilled, though they with Winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or natures changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The baset weed outbraves his dignity;
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
No longer mourn for me, when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me shall make you woe.
Oh, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
"Redemption"
Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel the old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
The told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts,
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts.
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight "Your suit is granted," said, and died.
"Affliction"
Kill me not every day,
Thou Lord of life, since thy one death for me
Is more than all my deaths can be,
Though I in broken pay
Die over each hour of Methuselah's stay.
If all men's tears were let
Into one common sewer, sea, and brine;
What were they all, compared to thine,
Wherein if they were set,
They would discolour thy most bloody sweat?
Thou art my grief alone.
Thou, Lord, conceal it not; and as thou art
All my delight, so all my smart.
Thy cross took up in one,
By way of impress, all my future moan.
"Virtue"
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My music shows ye have your closes,
All must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives,
But though the whole world turn to coal,
The chiefly lives.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
High like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of reflecting love; then on the shore
Of the wide word I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity.
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal freeting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not of passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in ryhme.
After dark vapours have opressed our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle south, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month , relieved of its pains,
Takes us a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come around us; as of leaves
Budding-fruit ripening in stillness-autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves-
Sweet Sapphos cheek-a smiling infants breath-
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs-
A woodland rivulet-a poet's death.
"On The Sea"
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometimes fell,
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh ye who have your eye-balls vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea;
Oh ye whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody-
Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love the purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints-I love with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!-and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
"The Primrose Bed"
The eunuch and the unicorn
Walked by the primrose bed;
The month was May, the time was morn,
Their hearts were dull as lead.
"Ah, unicorn", the eunuch cried,
"How tragic is our Spring,
With stir of love on every side,
And loud the sweet birds sing."
Then, arm and foreleg intertwined,
Both mourned their cruel fate-
The one was single of his kind,
the other could not mate.
"The Sorrow Of Love"
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's images and his cry.
"The Cold Heaven"
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Unit I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?
"The Second Coming"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
"Success"
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated - dying -
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
Angels - twice descending
Reimbursed my store -
Burglar! Banker - Father!
I am poor once more!
The Daisy follows soft the Sun -
And when his golden walk is done -
Sits shyly at his feet -
He - walking - finds the flower there -
Wherefore - Marauder - art thou here?
Because, Sir, love is sweet!
We are the Flower - Thou the Sun!
Forgive us, if as days decline -
We nearer steal to Thee!
Enamored of the parting West -
The peace - the flight - the Amethyst -
Night's possibility!
