Freedom

    Along the branches of the laden tree
        The ripe fruit smiling hang.    The afternoon
    Is emptied of all things done and things to be.
        Low in the sky the inconspicuous moon
    Stares enviously upon the mellow earth,
    That mocks her barren girth.

    Ripe blackberries and long green trailing grass
        Are motionless beneath the heavy light:
    The happy birds and creeping things that pass
        Go fitfully and stir as if in fright,
    That they have broken on some mystery
    In bramble or in tree.

    This is no hour for beings that are maiden;
        The spring is virgin, lightly afraid and cold,
    But now the whole round earth is ripe and laden
        And stirs beneath her coverlet of gold
    And in her agony ...

    Oh hear!    Oh hear!
    Across the sullen tide
    Across the echoing dome horizon-wide
    What pulse of fear
    Beats with tremendous boom!
    What call of instant doom,
    With thunderstroke of terror and of pride,
    With urgency that may not be denied,
    Reverberates upon the heart's own drum
    Come! . . .    Come! . . . for thou must come!

    Come forth, O Soul!
    This is thy day of power.
    This is the day and this the glorious hour
    That was the goal
    Of thy self-conquering strife.
    The love of child and wife,
    The fields of Earth and the wide ways of Thought--
    Did not thy purpose count them all as nought
    That in this moment thou thyself mayst give
    And in thy country's life for ever live?

There is no joy of earth that thrills
My bosom like the far-off hills!
Th' unchanging hills, that, shadowy,
Beckon our mutability
To follow and to gaze upon
Foundations of the dusk and dawn.
Meseems the very heavens are massed
Upon their shoulders, vague and vast
With all the skyey burden of
The winds and clouds and stars above.
Lo, how they sit before us, seeing
The laws that give all Beauty being!
Behold! to them, when dawn is near,
The nomads of the air appear,
Unfolding crimson camps of day
In brilliant bands; then march away;
And under burning battlements
Of twilight plant their tinted tents.
The truth of olden myths, that brood
By haunted stream and haunted wood,
They see; and feel the happiness
Of old at which we only guess:

(To R. F. B.)


We are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word
That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;

Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw,
And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law.

East and west and north, wherever the battle grew,
As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will to do.

Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease,
(Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!)

Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire,
Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire.

Road was never so rough that we left its purpose dark;
Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet more stark;

We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of t...

    What doest thou in heaven, O moon?
    Say, silent moon, what doest thou?
    Thou risest in the evening; thoughtfully
    Thou wanderest o'er the plain,
    Then sinkest to thy rest again.
    And art thou never satisfied
    With going o'er and o'er the selfsame ways?
    Art never wearied? Dost thou still
    Upon these valleys love to gaze?
    How much thy life is like
    The shepherd's life, forlorn!
    He rises in the early dawn,
    He moves his flock along the plain;
    The selfsame flocks, and streams, and herbs
    He sees again;
    Then drops to rest, the day's work o'er;
    And hopes for nothing more.
    Tell me, O moon, what signifies his life
    To him, thy life to thee? Say, whither tend
    My weary, short-lived pilgr...

Peace! Let me go, or ere it be too late;
    Dip not your arrows in the honey-mead;
    Paint not the wound through which my heart doth bleed;
Leave me unmock'd, unpitied to my fate--
Peace! Let me go.

Think you that words can smooth my rugged track?
    Words heal the stab your soft white hands have made,
    Or stir the burthen on my bosom laid?
Winds shook not Earth from Atlas' bended back--
Peace! Let me go.

What though it be the last time we shall meet--
    Raise your white brow, and wreathe your raven hair,
    And fill with music sweet the summer air;
Not this again shall draw me to your feet--
Peace! Let me go.

No laurels from my vanquish'd heart shall wave
    Round your triumphant beauty as you go,
    Not thus adorn'd work ou...

BOOK I

With what attractive charms this goodly frame
Of Nature touches the consenting hearts
Of mortal men; and what the pleasing stores
Which beauteous imitation thence derives
To deck the poet's, or the painter's toil;
My verse unfolds. Attend, ye gentle pow'rs
Of musical delight! and while I sing
Your gifts, your honours, dance around my strain.
Thou, smiling queen of every tuneful breast,
Indulgent Fancy! from the fruitful banks
Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
Where Shakespeare lies, be present: and with thee
Let Fiction come, upon her vagrant wings
Wafting ten thousand colours through the air,
Which, by the glances of her magic eye,
She blends and shifts at will, through countless forms,

Nations ten thousand years before These States, and many times ten thousand years before These States;
Garner'd clusters of ages, that men and women like us grew up and travel'd their course, and pass'd on;
What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes and nomads;
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others;
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions;
What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology;
What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death and the soul;
Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and undevelop'd;
Not a mark, not a record remains, And yet all remains.

O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more than we are for nothing;
I know that they be...

    When under the icy eaves
        The swallow heralds the sun,
    And the dove for its lost mate grieves
        And the young lambs play and run;
    When the sea is a plane of glass,
        And the blustering winds are still,
    And the strength of the thin snows pass
        In mists o'er the tawny hill -
    The spirit of life awakes
    In the fresh flags by the lakes.

    When the sick man seeks the air,
        And the graves of the dead grow green,
    Where the children play unaware
        Of the faces no longer seen;
    When all we have felt or can feel,
        And all we are or have been,
    And all the heart can hide or reveal,
        Knocks gently, and enters in: -
    The spirit of life awakes,
    In the fresh fla...

Push back the brambles, berry-blue:
The hollowed spring is full in view:
Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern
Its rock-embedded, crystal urn.
Not for the loneliness that keeps
The coigne wherein its silence sleeps;
Not for wild butterflies that sway
Their pansy pinions all the day
Above its mirror; nor the bee,
Nor dragon-fly, that passing see
Themselves reflected in its spar;
Not for the one white liquid star,
That twinkles in its firmament;
Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent
Athwart it when the kindly night
Beads all its grasses with the light
Small jewels of the dimpled dew;
Not for the day's inverted blue
Nor the quaint, dimly coloured stones
That dance within it where it moans:
Not for all these I love to sit
In silence and to gaze ...

Gold or silver, every day,
Dies to gray.
There are knots in every skein.
Hours of work and hours of play
Fade away
Into one immense Inane.
Shadow and substance, chaff and grain,
Are as vain
As the foam or as the spray.
Life goes crooning, faint and fain,
One refrain:
'If it could be always May!'

Though the earth be green and gay,
Though, they say,
Man the cup of heaven may drain;
Though, his little world to sway,
He display
Hoard on hoard of pith and brain:
Autumn brings a mist and rain
That constrain

Him and his to know decay,
Where undimmed the lights that wane
Would remain,
If it could be always May.

YEA, alas, must turn to NAY,
Flesh to clay.
Chance and Time are ever twain.
Men may sc...

While not a leaf seems faded; while the fields,
With ripening harvest prodigally fair,
In brightest sunshine bask; this nipping air,
Sent from some distant clime where Winter wields
His icy scimitar, a foretaste yields
Of bitter change, and bids the flowers beware;
And whispers to the silent birds, "Prepare
Against the threatening foe your trustiest shields."
For me, who under kindlier laws belong
To Nature's tuneful quire, this rustling dry
Through leaves yet green, and yon crystalline sky,
Announce a season potent to renew,
'Mid frost and snow, the instinctive joys of song,
And nobler cares than listless summer knew.

I.

The plain was grassy, wild and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere
An under-roof of doleful gray.
With an inner voice the river ran,
Adown it floated a dying swan,
And loudly did lament.
It was the middle of the day.
Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went.



II.

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
And far thro’ the marish green and still
The tangled water-courses slept,
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

The doors were wide, the story saith,
Out of the night came the patient wraith.
He might not speak, and he could not stir
A hair of the Baron’s minniver.
Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,
He roved the castle to find his kin.
And oh! ’twas a piteous sight to see
The dumb ghost follow his enemy!
The Return of Imray.



Before my Spring I garnered Autumn's gain,
Out of her time my field was white with grain,
The year gave up her secrets, to my woe.
Forced and deflowered each sick season lay
In mystery of increase and decay;
I saw the sunset ere men see the day,
Who am too wise in all I should not know.
Without Benefit of Clergy.



There’s a convict more in the Central Jail,
Behind the old mud wall;
There’s a...

I heard a boy that climbed up Dover's Hill
Singing Sweet England, sweeter for his song.
The notes crept muffled through the copse, but still
Sharply recalled the things forgotten long,
The music that my own boy's lips had known,
Singing, and old airs on a wild flute blown;

And other hills, more grim and lonely far,
And valleys empty of these orchard trees;
A sheep-pond filled with the moon, a single star
I had watched by night searching the wreckful seas;
And all the streets and streets that childhood knew
In years when London streets were all my view.

And I remembered how that song I heard,
Sweet England, sung by children on May-day,
Nor any song was sweeter of a bird
Than that half-grievous air from children gay--
For then, as now, ...

Lo! where the Moon along the sky
Sails with her happy destiny;
Oft is she hid from mortal eye
Or dimly seen,
But when the clouds asunder fly
How bright her mien!

Far different we, a froward race,
Thousands though rich in Fortune's grace
With cherished sullenness of pace
Their way pursue,
Ingrates who wear a smileless face
The whole year through.

If kindred humours e'er would make
My spirit droop for drooping's sake,
From Fancy following in thy wake,
Bright ship of heaven!
A counter impulse let me take
And be forgiven.

Lo! where the Moon along the sky
Sails with her happy destiny;
Oft is she hid from mortal eye
Or dimly seen,
But when the clouds asunder fly
How bright her mien!

Far different we, a froward race,
Thousands though rich in Fortune's grace
With cherished sullenness of pace
Their way pursue,
Ingrates who wear a smileless face
The whole year through.

If kindred humours e'er would make
My spirit droop for drooping's sake,
From Fancy following in thy wake,
Bright ship of heaven!
A counter impulse let me take
And be forgiven.

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream,
That vanished with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, "Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!"

Yes, as my swift days near their goal:
'Tis all that I implore;
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.