Death

Golden Apollo, that thro' heaven wide
Scatter'st the rays of light, and truth's beams,
In lucent words my darkling verses dight,
And wash my earthy mind in thy clear streams,
That wisdom may descend in fairy dreams,
All while the jocund hours in thy train
Scatter their fancies at thy poet's feet;
And when thou yields to night thy wide domain,
Let rays of truth enlight his sleeping brain.
For brutish Pan in vain might thee assay
With tinkling sounds to dash thy nervous verse,
Sound without sense; yet in his rude affray,
(For ignorance is Folly's leasing nurse
And love of Folly needs none other's curse)
Midas the praise hath gain'd of lengthen'd ears,
For which himself might deem him ne'er the worse
To sit in council with his modern peers,
And judge of tink...

I am the Muse who sung alway
By Jove, at dawn of the first day.
Star-crowned, sole-sitting, long I wrought
To fire the stagnant earth with thought:
On spawning slime my song prevails,
Wolves shed their fangs, and dragons scales;
Flushed in the sky the sweet May-morn,
Earth smiled with flowers, and man was born.
Then Asia yeaned her shepherd race,
And Nile substructs her granite base,--
Tented Tartary, columned Nile,--
And, under vines, on rocky isle,
Or on wind-blown sea-marge bleak,
Forward stepped the perfect Greek:
That wit and joy might find a tongue,
And earth grow civil, HOMER sung.

Flown to Italy from Greece,
I brooded long and held my peace,
For I am wont to sing uncalled,
And in days of evil plight
Unlock doors of new delight...

If sometimes in the dark blue eye,
Or in the deep red wine,
Or soothed by gentlest melody,
Still warms this heart of mine,
Yet something colder in the blood,
And calmer in the brain,
Have whispered that my youth's bright flood
Ebbs, not to flow again.

If by Helvetia's azure lake,
Or Arno's yellow stream,
Each star of memory could awake,
As in my first young dream,
I know that when mine eye shall greet
The hillsides bleak and bare,
That gird my home, it will not meet
My childhood's sunsets there.


Oh, when love's first, sweet, stolen kiss
Burned on my boyish brow,
Was that young forehead worn as this?
Was that flushed cheek as now?
Were that wild pulse and throbbing heart
Like these, which vainly strive,
In thankle...

Lo from our loitering ship
a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth
on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hill-sides above,
striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west
from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point
like the building of Gods that have been,
The last of that waste of the mountains
all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,
And bright with the dawn that began
just now at the ending of day.

Ah! what came we forth for to see
that our hearts are so hot with desire?
Is it enough for our rest,
the sight of this desolate strand,
And the mountain-waste voiceless as death
but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?
Why do we lo...

I said of laughter: it is vain.
    Of mirth I said: what profits it?
    Therefore I found a book, and writ
Therein how ease and also pain,
How health and sickness, every one
Is vanity beneath the sun.

Man walks in a vain shadow; he
    Disquieteth himself in vain.
    The things that were shall be again;
The rivers do not fill the sea,
But turn back to their secret source;
The winds too turn upon their course.

Our treasures moth and rust corrupt,
    Or thieves break through and steal, or they
    Make themselves wings and fly away.
One man made merry as he supped,
Nor guessed how when that night grew dim,
His soul would be required of him.

We build our houses on the sand
    Comely withoutside and within;
    But when t...

Into the darkness and the hush of night
    Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,
    And with it fade the phantoms of the day,
    The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light,
The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,
    The unprofitable splendor and display,
    The agitations, and the cares that prey
    Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.
The better life begins; the world no more
    Molests us; all its records we erase
    From the dull common-place book of our lives,
That like a palimpsest is written o'er
    With trivial incidents of time and place,
    And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.

Child, when they say that others
Have been or are like you,
Babes fit to be your brothers,
Sweet human drops of dew,
Bright fruit of mortal mothers,
What should one say or do?

We know the thought is treason,
We feel the dream absurd;
A claim rebuked of reason,
That withers at a word:
For never shone the season
That bore so blithe a bird.

Some smiles may seem as merry,
Some glances gleam as wise,
From lips as like a cherry
And scarce less gracious eyes;
Eyes browner than a berry,
Lips red as morning’s rise.

But never yet rang laughter
So sweet in gladdened ears
Through wall and floor and rafter
As all this household hears
And rings response thereafter
Till cloudiest weather clears.

When those your ...

The Text of this little ballad is given from Bell's Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England.

It should be compared with Lord Lovel.


LADY ALICE

    1.
    Lady Alice was sitting in her bower-window,
        At midnight mending her quoif,
    And there she saw as fine a corpse
        As ever she saw in her life.

    2.
    'What bear ye, what bear ye, ye six men tall?
        What bear ye on your shoulders?'
    'We bear the corpse of Giles Collins,
        An old and true lover of yours.'

    3.
    'O lay him down gently, ye six men tall,
        All on the grass so green,
    And to-morrow, when the sun goes down,
        Lady Alice a corpse shall be seen.

    4.
   ...

Earthly gods my lyre shall win your praise,
Though but wont its gentle sounds to raise
When the joyous feast the people throng;
Softly at your pompous-sounding names,
Shyly round your greatness purple flames,
Trembles now my song.

Answer! shall I strike the golden string,
When, borne on by exultation's wing,
O'er the battle-field your chariots trail?
When ye, from the iron grasp set free,
For your mistress' soft arms, joyously
Change your pond'rous mail?

Shall my daring hymn, ye gods, resound,
While the golden splendor gleams around,
Where, by mystic darkness overcome,
With the thunderbolt your spleen may play,
Or in crime humanity array,
Till the grave is dumb?

Say! shall peace 'neath crowns be now my theme?
Shall I boast, ye ...

I saw a tract of ocean locked in-land
    Within a field's embrace -
The very sea! Afar it fled the strand
    And gave the seasons chase,
And met the night alone, the tempest spanned,
    Saw sunrise face to face.

O Poet, more than ocean, lonelier!
    In inaccessible rest
And storm remote, thou, sea of thoughts, dost stir,
    Scattered through east to west, -
Now, while thou closest with the kiss of her
    Who locks thee to her breast.

Near Martinpuisch that night of hell
Two men were struck by the same shell,
Together tumbling in one heap
Senseless and limp like slaughtered sheep.

One was a pale eighteen-year-old,
Girlish and thin and not too bold,
Pressed for the war ten years too soon,
The shame and pity of his platoon.

The other came from far-off lands
With bristling chin and whiskered hands,
He had known death and hell before
In Mexico and Ecuador.

Yet in his death this cut-throat wild
Groaned "Mother!    Mother!" like a child,
While that poor innocent in man's clothes
Died cursing God with brutal oaths.

Old Sergeant Smith, kindest of men,
Wrote out two copies there and then
Of his accustomed funeral speech
To cheer the womenfolk of each.

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye,
That thou consum’st thy self in single life?
Ah! if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow and still weep
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep
By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:
Look! what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it.
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.

Now as Heaven is my Lot, they're the Pests of the Nation!
Wherever they can come
With clankum and blankum
'Tis all Botheration, & Hell & Damnation,
With fun, jeering
Conjuring
Sky-staring,
Loungering,
And still to the tune of Transmogrification,
Those muttering
Spluttering
Ventriloquogusty
Poets
With no Hats
Or Hats that are rusty.
They're my Torment and Curse
And harass me worse
And bait me and bay me, far sorer I vow
Than the Screech of the Owl
Or the witch-wolf's long howl,
Or sheep-killing Butcher-dog's inward Bow wow
For me they all spite, an unfortunate Wight.
And the very first moment that I came to Light
A Rascal call'd Voss the more to his scandal,
Turn'd me into a sickle with never a handle.
A Nigh...

The coup d’etat is blotted out
With fresher blood, with blacker crime,
As midnight horrors put to rout
The vaguer ghosts of twilight-time.

“Greeting from those who are to die!
Hail Caesar!” Draw the curtains round.
In vain! That mournful mocking cry
Pierces the purple with its sound.

And they who raise it enter too,
With spectral looks and noiseless tread,
Unbidden, hold their dread review,
Beside the Emperor’s very bed.

They sought in his deserted tent;
They found him in the German camp.
They tarry till the oil be spent
That feeds his life’s poor flickering lamp.

The hope of France, the “gilded youth,”
So answering the trumpet’s peal
As if revealing how, in sooth,
The gilding oft o’erlies the steel.

Soldiers A...

An agate-black, your roguish eyes
Claim no proud lineage of the skies,
No starry blue; but of good earth
The reckless witchery and mirth.
Looped in your raven hair's repose,
A hot aroma, one red rose
Dies; envious of that loveliness,
By being near which its is less.

Twin sea shells, hung with pearls, your ears,
Whose slender rosiness appears
Part of the pearls; whose pallid fire
Binds the attention these inspire.
One slim hand crumples up the lace
About your bosom's swelling grace;
A ruby at your samite throat
Lends the required color note.

The moon bears through the violet night
A pearly urn of chaliced light;
And from your dark-railed balcony
You stoop and wave your fan at me.
O'er orange orchards and the rose
Vague, odor...

    Here I lie close to the grave
    Of Old Bill Piersol,
    Who grew rich trading with the Indians, and who
    Afterwards took the Bankrupt Law
    And emerged from it richer than ever
    Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
    And beholding how Old Bill and other grew in wealth
    Robbed a traveler one Night near Proctor's Grove,
    Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
    For which I was tried and hanged.
    That was my way of going into bankruptcy.
    Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways
    Sleep peacefully side by side.

Sweet wreck of loveliness! alas, how soon
The sad brief summer of thy joys hath fled:
How sorrows Friendship for thy hapless doom,
Thy beauty faded, and thy hopes all dead.
Oh! 'twas that beauty's power which first destroy'd
Thy mind's serenity; its charms but led
The faithless friend, that thy pure love enjoy'd,
To tear the beauteous blossom from its bed.
How reason shudders at thy frenzied air!
To see thee smile, with fancy's dreams possess'd;
Or shrink, the frozen image of despair.
Or, love-enraptured, chant thy griefs to rest:
Oh! cease that mournful voice, affliction's child,
My heart but bleeds to hear thy musings wild.

The Lady of the Motor-car she stareth straight ahead;
Her face is like the stone, my friend, her face is like the dead;
Her face is like the stone, my friend, because she is “well-bred”,
Because her heart is dead, my friend, as all her life was dead.

The Lady of the Motor-car she speaketh like a man,
Because her girlhood never was, nor womanhood began.
She says, “To the Aus-traliah, John!” and “Home” when she hath been.
And to the husband at her side she says, “Whhat doo you mean?”

The Lady of the Motor-car her very soul is dead,
Because she never helped herself nor had to work for bread;
The Lady of the Motor-car sits in her sitting-room,
Her stony face has never changed though all the land is gloom.

Her motor-car hath gone to hell, the hell that man hath made;...