Death

Empty as death and slow as pain
The days went by on leaden feet;
And parson’s week had come again
As I walked down the little street.

Without, the weary doves were calling,
The sun burned on the banks of mud;
Within, old maids were caterwauling
A dismal tale of thorns and blood.

I thought of all the church bells ringing
In towns that Christian folks were in;
I heard the godly maidens singing;
I turned into the house of sin.

The house of sin was dark & mean,
With dying flowers round the door;
They spat their betel juice between
The rotten bamboos of the floor.

Why did I come, the woman cried,
So seldom to her beds of ease?
When I was not, her spirit died,
And would I give her ten rupees.

The weeks went by, a...

A Faint, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class's lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and sable.

I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast you
With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin as you dipped
Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast you,
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks,
Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast.

You amid the bog-end's yellow incantation,
You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above,
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs,

    I.

    As one in sorrow looks upon
        The dead face of a loyal friend,
    By the dim light of New Year's dawn
        I saw the Old Year end.

    Upon the pallid features lay
        The dear old smile - so warm and bright
    Ere thus its cheer had died away
        In ashes of delight.

    The hands that I had learned to love
        With strength of passion half divine,
    Were folded now, all heedless of
        The emptiness of mine.

    The eyes that once had shed their bright
        Sweet looks like sunshine, now were dull,
    And ever lidded from the light
        That made them beautiful.


    II.

    The chimes of bells were in the air,
        And sounds of mirth in hall and street...

Vppon a bank with roses set about,
Where pretty turtles ioyning bil to bill,
And gentle springs steale softly murmuring out
Washing the foote of pleasures sacred hill:
There little loue sore wounded lyes,
His bowe and arowes broken,
Bedewd with teares from Venus eyes
Oh greeuous to be spoken.

Beare him my hart slaine with her scornefull eye
Where sticks the arrowe that poore hart did kill,
With whose sharp pile request him ere he die,
About the same to write his latest will,
And bid him send it backe to mee,
At instant of his dying,
That cruell cruell shee may see
My faith and her denying.

His chappell be a mournefull Cypresse Shade,
And for a chauntry Philomels sweet lay,
Where prayers shall continually be made
By pilgrim louers pas...

    Smoking lately in my "Funny," as I'm wont, beneath the bank,
    Listening to Cam's rippling murmurs thro' the weeds and willows dank,
    As I chewed the Cud of fancy, from the water there appeared
    An old man, fierce-eyed, and filthy, with a long and tangled beard;
    To the oozy shore he paddled, clinging to my Funny's nose,
    Till, in all his mud majestic, Cam's gigantic form arose.
    Brawny, broad of shoulders was he, hairy were his face and head,
    And amid loud lamentations tears incessantly he shed.
    "Son," he cried, "the sorrows pity of thy melancholy sire!
    Pity Camus! pity Cambridge! pity our disasters dire!
    Five long years hath Isis triumphed, five long years have seen my Eight
    Rowing second, vainly struggling 'gainst an unrelenting fate.
 ...

Sing, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song
Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts
Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams
Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make
A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.
Sing, mountain-wind, and take thine ancient tone,
The grand, austere, imperial utterance.
Which drives my soul before it back to days
In one dark hour of which, when Storm rode high
Past broken hills, and when the polar gale
Roared round the Otway with the bitter breath
That speaks for ever of the White South Land
Alone with God and Silence in the cold,
I heard the touching tale of Basil Moss,

A story shining with a woman’s love!
And who that knows that love can ever doubt
How dear, divine, sublime a thing it is;
For while th...

O Where is our Mother of Peace
Nodding her purple hood?
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood.
I would that the death-pale deer
Had come through the mountain side,
And trampled the mountain away,
And drunk up the murmuring tide;
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood,
And our Mother of Peace has forgot me
Under her purple hood.

(May 24, 1819 - January 22, 1901)

Sceptre and orb and crown,
High ensigns of a sovranty containing
The beauty and strength and state of half a World,
Pass from her, and she fades
Into the old, inviolable peace.

I

She had been ours so long
She seemed a piece of ENGLAND: spirit and blood
And message ENGLAND'S self,
Home-coloured, ENGLAND in look and deed and dream;
Like the rich meadows and woods, the serene rivers,
And sea-charmed cliffs and beaches, that still bring
A rush of tender pride to the heart
That beats in ENGLAND'S airs to ENGLAND'S ends:
August, familiar, irremovable,
Like the good stars that shine
In the good skies that only ENGLAND knows:
So that we held it sure
GOD'S aim, GOD'S will, GOD'S way,
When Empire fr...

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental c...

Beloved! your hair was golden
As tender tints of sunrise,
As corn beside the River
    In softly varying hues.
I loved you for your slightness,
Your melancholy sweetness,
Your changeful eyes, that promised
    What your lips would still refuse.

You came to me, and loved me,
Were mine upon the River,
The azure water saw us
    And the blue transparent sky;
The Lotus flowers knew it,
Our happiness together,
While life was only River,
    Only love, and you and I.

Love wakened on the River,
To sounds of running water,
With silver Stars for witness
    And reflected Stars for light;
Awakened to existence,
With ripples for first music
And sunlight on the River
    For earliest sense of sight.

Love grew upon ...

For ages on our river borders,
These tassels in their tawny bloom,
And willowy studs of downy silver,
Have prophesied of Spring to come.

For ages have the unbound waters
Smiled on them from their pebbly hem,
And the clear carol of the robin
And song of bluebird welcomed them.

But never yet from smiling river,
Or song of early bird, have they
Been greeted with a gladder welcome
Than whispers from my heart to-day.

They break the spell of cold and darkness,
The weary watch of sleepless pain;
And from my heart, as from the river,
The ice of winter melts again.

Thanks, Mary! for this wild-wood token
Of Freya’s footsteps drawing near;
Almost, as in the rune of Asgard,
The growing of the grass I hear.

It is as if the ...

"The Southern Transept, hardly known by any other name but Poet's Corner."

DEAN STANLEY.

Tread softly here; the sacredest of tombs
Are those that hold your Poets.    Kings and queens
Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.
Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!
But he who from the darkling mass of men
Is on the wing of heavenly thought upborne
To finer ether, and becomes a voice
For all the voiceless, God anointed him:
His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.

Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.
Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns
Lies richer dust than ever nature hid
Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,
Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand--
The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.
How vain ...

By Sidney and Clifford Lanier.



O wish that's vainer than the plash
Of these wave-whimsies on the shore:
"Give us a pearl to fill the gash -
God, let our dead friend live once more!"

O wish that's stronger than the stroke
Of yelling wave and snapping levin;
"God, lift us o'er the Last Day's smoke,
All white, to Thee and her in Heaven!"

O wish that's swifter than the race
Of wave and wind in sea and sky;
Let's take the grave-cloth from her face
And fall in the grave, and kiss, and die!

Look! High above a glittering calm
Of sea and sky and kingly sun,
She shines and smiles, and waves a palm -
And now we wish - Thy will be done!


Montgomery, Alabama, 1866.

1.
Let those who pine in pride or in revenge,
Or think that ill for ill should be repaid,
Who barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange
Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade,
Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn
Such bitter faith beside Marenghi's urn.

2.
A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now...

...

3.
Another scene are wise Etruria knew
Its second ruin through internal strife
And tyrants through the breach of discord threw
The chain which binds and kills. As death to life,
As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison)
So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom's foison.

4.
In Pisa's church a cup of sculptured gold
Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn:
A Sacram...

We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,
And the whole darkness of the world we know,
How can we guess its truth, to darkness born,
The obscure consequence of absent glow?
Only the stars do teach us light. We grasp
Their scattered smallnesses with thoughts that stray,
And, though their eyes look through night's complete mask,
Yet they speak not the features of the day.
Why should these small denials of the whole
More than the black whole the pleased eyes attract?
Why what it calls «worth» does the captive soul
Add to the small and from the large detract?
    So, put of light's love wishing it night's stretch,
    A nightly thought of day we darkly reach.

Singer of songs of the hills
Dreamer, by waters unstirred,
Back in a valley of rills,
Home of the leaf and the bird!
Read in this fall of the year
Just the compassionate phrase,
Faded with traces of tear,
Written in far-away days:

“Gone is the light of my lap
(Lord, at Thy bidding I bow),
Here is my little one’s cap,
He has no need of it now,
Give it to somebody’s boy
Somebody’s darling” she wrote.
Touching was Bob in his joy
Bob without boots or a coat.

Only a cap; but it gave
Capless and comfortless one
Happiness, bright as the brave,
Beautiful light of the sun.
Soft may the sanctified sod
Rest on the father who led
Bob from the gutter, unshod
Covered his cold little head!

Bob from the foot to the cro...

When I am only fit to go to bed,
Or hobble out to sit within the sun,
Ring down the curtain, say the play is done,
And the last petals of the poppy shed!

I do not want to live when I am old,
I have no use for things I cannot love;
And when the day that I am talking of
(Which God forfend!) is come, it will be cold.

But if there is another place than this,
Where all the men will greet me as "Old Man,"
And all the women wrap me in a smile,
Where money is more useless than a kiss,
And good wine is not put beneath the ban,
I will go there and stay a little while.

Hast ever tramped along the road
That has no end?
The far brown winding road, your one
Fast friend
A tattered weather-beaten swag,
A silent mate
To send
His dumb warm comfort to the heart,
A fount where dreams ascend.

There’s wondrous freedom on the road
That has no end;
A man’s heart glows, his spirit leaps
To blend
Its joy of life with fierce wind’s gust
Upon his face:
To lend
Its cry to Nature’s tumult, full
And shrill, as twilight shades descend.

The flowers bloom along the road
That has no end
Cool breezes blow, the gum trees sway
And bend;
The wild doves woo, and softly coo
Their soothing notes,
And mend
Heart’s throbbing pain to sweet content,
And peace lights on the mind’s sad trend