Betrayal

Against my love shall be as I am now,
With Time’s injurious hand crush’d and o’erworn;
When hours have drain’d his blood and fill’d his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travell’d on to age’s steepy night;
And all those beauties whereof now he’s king
Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age’s cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Cherry bloom and green buds bursting
Fleck the azure skies;
In the spring wood, hungering, thirsting,
Faint an Indian lies.

To behold his guardian spirit
Fasts the dusky youth;
Prays that thus he may inherit
Warrior strength and truth.

Weak he grows, the war-path gory
Seems a far delight;
Now he scans the flowers, whose glory
Is not won by fight.

"Hunger kills me; see my arrow
Bloodless lies: I ask,
If life's doom be grave-pit narrow,
Deathless make its task.

"For man's welfare guide my being,
So I shall not die
Like the flow'rets, fading, fleeing,
When the snow is nigh.

"Medicine from the plants we borrow,
Salves from many a leaf;
May they not kill hunger's sorrow,
Give with food relief?"
<...

Beetling walls with ivy grown,
Frowning heights of mossy stone;
Turret, with its flaunting flag
Flung from battlemented crag;
Dungeon-keep and fortalice
Looking down a precipice
O’er the darkly glancing wave
By the Lurline-haunted cave;
Robber haunt and maiden bower,
Home of Love and Crime and Power,
That’s the scenery, in fine,
Of the Legends of the Rhine.

One bold baron, double-dyed
Bigamist and parricide,
And, as most the stories run,
Partner of the Evil One;
Injured innocence in white,
Fair but idiotic quite,
Wringing of her lily hands;
Valor fresh from Paynim lands,
Abbot ruddy, hermit pale,
Minstrel fraught with many a tale,
Are the actors that combine
In the Legends of the Rhine.

Bell-mouthed flagons r...

You hunted me with all the pack,
Too blind, too blind, to see
By no wild hope of force or greed
Could you make sure of me.

And like a phantom through the glades,
With tender breast aglow,
The goddess in me laughed to hear
Your horns a-roving go.

She laughed to think no mortal ever
By dint of mortal flesh
The very Cause that was the Hunt
One moment could enmesh:

That though with captive limbs I lay,
Stilled breath and vanquished eyes,
He that hunts Love with horse and hound
Hunts out his heart and eyes.

I.

Morning

Her rain-kissed face is fresh as rain,
Is cool and fresh as a rain-wet leaf;
She glimmers at my window-pane,
And all my grief
Becomes a feeble rushlight, seen no more
When the gold of her gown sweeps in my door.

II.

Forenoon

Great blurs of woodland waved with wind;
Gray paths, down which October came,
That now November's blasts have thinned
And flecked with fiercer flame,
Are her delight. She loves to lie
Regarding with a gray-blue eye
The far-off hills that hold the sky:
And I I lie and gaze with her
Beyond the autumn woods and ways
Into the hope of coming days,
The spring that nothing shall deter,
That puts my soul in unison
With what's to do and what is done.

III.

N...

i.

Dearest and best of maidens, whom the Fates
    have dower'd with beauty, whom the glory-gates
Have shown so splendid in my waking sight,
Is't well, thou syren! thus to haunt the night
And grant no mercy, none from week to week
All through the year? Is't well my soul to seek
    And shun my body? Is't throughout ordain'd
That thou shouldst spurn a love so tender-meek?


ii.

It is my joy to serve thee, 'tis my pride
    To own my follies, though anew denied
The chance of wisdom, and for this, who knows?
I shall be counted, ere the season's close,
A time-perverter. Yes! I shall be shamed,
And frown'd upon, and day by day proclaim'd
    A foe to virtue, though, in seeking thee
I seek the goal that Virtue's self hath named.

Behold him now his genuine colours wear,
    That specious False-One, by whose cruel wiles
    I lost thy amity; saw thy dear smiles
    Eclips'd; those smiles, that us'd my heart to cheer,
Wak'd by thy grateful sense of many a year
    When rose thy youth, by Friendship's pleasing toils
    Cultur'd; - but DYING! - O! for ever fade
    The angry fires. - Each thought, that might upbraid
Thy broken faith, which yet my soul deplores,
    Now as eternally is past and gone
    As are the interesting, the happy hours,
Days, years, we shar'd together. They are flown!
    Yet long must I lament thy hapless doom,
    Thy lavish'd life and early-hasten'd tomb.

These are the tales those merry guests
Told to each other, well or ill;
Like summer birds that lift their crests
Above the borders of their nests
And twitter, and again are still.

These are the tales, or new or old,
In idle moments idly told;
Flowers of the field with petals thin,
Lilies that neither toil nor spin,
And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse
Hung in the parlor of the inn
Beneath the sign of the Red Horse.


And still, reluctant to retire,
The friends sat talking by the fire
And watched the smouldering embers burn
To ashes, and flash up again
Into a momentary glow,
Lingering like them when forced to go,
And going when they would remain;
For on the morrow they must turn
Their faces homeward, and the pain
Of part...

I

Right upward on the road of fame
With sounding steps the poet came;
Born and nourished in miracles,
His feet were shod with golden bells,
Or where he stepped the soil did peal
As if the dust were glass and steel.
The gallant child where'er he came
Threw to each fact a tuneful name.
The things whereon he cast his eyes
Could not the nations rebaptize,
Nor Time's snows hide the names he set,
Nor last posterity forget.
Yet every scroll whereon he wrote
In latent fire his secret thought,
Fell unregarded to the ground,
Unseen by such as stood around.
The pious wind took it away,
The reverent darkness hid the lay.
Methought like water-haunting birds
Divers or dippers were his words,
And idle clowns beside the mere
At the new visi...

So well I knew your habits and your ways,
That like a picture painted on the skies,
At the sweet closing of the summer days,
    You stand before my eyes.

I see you on the old verandah there,
While slow the shadows of the twilight fall,
I see the very carving on the chair
    You tilt against the wall.

The West grows dim.    The faithful evening star
Comes out and sheds its tender patient beam.
I almost catch the scent of your cigar,
    As you sit there and dream.

But dream of what?    I know your outward life -
Your ways, your habits; know they have not changed.
But has one thought of me survived the strife
    Since we two were estranged?

I know not of the workings of your heart;
And yet I sometimes make myself believe
That...

SEVEN YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH

I shiver, Spirit fierce and bold,
At thought of what I now behold:
As vapours breathed from dungeons cold,
Strike pleasure dead,
So sadness comes from out the mould
Where Burns is laid.

And have I then thy bones so near,
And thou forbidden to appear?
As if it were thyself that's here
I shrink with pain;
And both my wishes and my fear
Alike are vain.

Off weight, nor press on weight! away
Dark thoughts! they came, but not to stay;
With chastened feelings would I pay
The tribute due
To him, and aught that hides his clay
From mortal view.

Fresh as the flower, whose modest worth
He sang, his genius "glinted" forth,
Rose like a star that touching earth,
For so it seems,
Doth glori...

Fragment of a Dream.--The great Painters supposed to be Magicians.--The Beginnings of the Art.--Gildings on the Glories and Draperies.-- Improvements under Giotto, etc.--The first Dawn of the true Style in Masaccio.--Studied by all the great Artists who followed him.--Leonardo da Vinci, with whom commenced the Golden Age of Painting.--His Knowledge of Mathematics and of Music.--His female heads all like each other.-- Triangular Faces.--Portraits of Mona Lisa, etc.--Picture of Vanity and Modesty.--His chef-d'oeuvre, the Last Supper.--Faded and almost effaced.


Filled with the wonders I had seen
    In Rome's stupendous shrines and halls,
I felt the veil of sleep serene
Come o'er the memory of each scene,
    As twilight o'er the landscape falls.
Nor was it slumber, sound and deep,

Late autumns, winters, spring-times steeped in mud,
anaesthetizing seasons! You I praise, and love
for so enveloping my heart and brain
in vaporous shrouds, in sepulchres of rain.


In this vast landscape where chill south winds play,
where long nights hoarsen the shrill weather-vane,
it opens wide its raven’s wings, my soul,
freer than in times of mild renewal.


Nothing’s sweeter to my heart, full of sorrows,
on which the hoar-frost fell in some past time,
O pallid seasons, queens of our clime,


than the changeless look of your pale shadows,
except, two by two, to lay our grief to rest
in some moonless night, on a perilous bed.

My mind had almost died.

It had refused a game of tag on a common
with surly children and they steadfastly took revenge.

My fate like Blondin's walk across Niagara
saw cataracts looming large,
hiss & foam,
then visions of serpents,
farawy monsters &
inner tension of rocks opening.

The churned, brown water opened like a basket before me.
Maurading bubbles took on elephantine shapes,
my barrel creeked.
Faraway, the edge & drop yawned in indifferent harmony.
The brown walls of my fortress barrel became like palates
& sutures of my skull imprisoning the brain;
the trickle of invading water ever a reminder.

The close of the story?
Nothing. What is there to record after a river passes?
What remains of things unseen, ...

Whatever men for loyalty pretend,
'Tis wisdom's part to doubt a faithful friend.

MONTANO, SILVIO, AND MIRTILLO, SHEPHERDS

MON. Bad are the times. SIL. And worse than they are we.
MON. Troth, bad are both; worse fruit, and ill the tree:
The feast of shepherds fail. SIL. None crowns the cup
Of wassail now, or sets the quintel up:
And he, who used to lead the country-round,
Youthful Mirtillo, here he comes, grief-drown'd.
AMBO. Let's cheer him up. SIL. Behold him weeping-ripe.
MIRT. Ah, Amarillis! farewell mirth and pipe;
Since thou art gone, no more I mean to play
To these smooth lawns, my mirthful roundelay.
Dear Amarillis! MON. Hark! SIL. Mark! MIRT. This
earth grew sweet
Where, Amarillis, thou didst set thy feet.
AMBO Poor pitied youth! MIRT. And here the breath
of kine
And sheep grew more sweet by that breath of thine.
This do...

        On the white throat of the' useless passion
    That scorched my soul with its burning breath
        I clutched my fingers in murderous fashion,
    And gathered them close in a grip of death;
        For why should I fan, or feed with fuel,
    A love that showed me but blank despair?
        So my hold was firm, and my grasp was cruel -
    I meant to strangle it then and there!

        I thought it was dead. But with no warning,
    It rose from its grave last night, and came
        And stood by my bed till the early morning,
    And over and over it spoke your name.
        Its throat was red where my hands had held it;
    It burned my brow with its scorching breath;
        And I said, the moment my eyes beheld it,
    "A love like this can kn...

"Here Man more purely lives, less oft doth fall,
"More promptly rises, walks with stricter heed,
"More safely rests, dies happier, is freed
"Earlier from cleansing fires, and gains withal
"A brighter crown." On yon Cistertian wall
'That' confident assurance may be read;
And, to like shelter, from the world have fled
Increasing multitudes. The potent call
Doubtless shall cheat full oft the heart's desires;
Yet, while the rugged Age on pliant knee
Vows to rapt Fancy humble fealty,
A gentler life spreads round the holy spires;
Where'er they rise, the sylvan waste retires,
And aery harvests crown the fertile lea.