Freedom

There was a morrice on the moonlight plain,
And music echoed in the woody glade,
For fay-like forms, as of Titania's train,
Upon a summer eve, beneath the shade
Of Netley's ivied ruins, to the sound
Of sprightly minstrelsy did beat the ground:
Come, take hands! and lightly move,
While our boat, in yonder cove,
Rests upon the darkening sea;
Come, take hands, and follow me!

Netley! thy dim and desolated fane
Hath heard, perhaps, the spirits of the night
Shrieking, at times, amid the wind and rain;
Or haply, when the full-orbed moon shone bright,
Thy glimmering aisles have echoed to the song
Of fairy Mab, who led her shadowy masque along.
Now, as to the sprightly sound
Of moonlight minstrelsy we beat the ground;
From the pale nooks, in accent clea...

How busily those little fingers soft
That within mine own are clasped so oft
Have been, throughout this bright summer day,
With pebbles and shells and leaves at play.
They have sought birds' nests, plucked many a flower,
Have decked with mosses the garden bower,
Built tiny boats, without helm to steer,
Yet floated them safe o'er the lakelet clear.

Ah! a time will come, and that ere long,
When those soft hands will grow firm and strong;
When they'll fling all boyish toys aside
In the dawning strength of manhood's pride;
Disdaining the prizes, the treasures gay,
That they seize with such eager haste to-day;
And parting with youth's joys, hopes and fears,
Seek to grasp the aims of manhood's years.

Be it, then, thy care, my gentle boy,
That new-bo...

Snowdrift of the mountains,
Spindrift of the sea,
We who down the border
Rove from gloom to glee,--

Snowdrift of the mountains,
Spindrift of the sea,
There be no such gypsies
Over earth as we.

Snowdrift of the mountains,
Spindrift of the sea,
Let us part the treasure
Of the world in three.

Snowdrift of the mountains,
Spindrift of the sea,
You shall keep your kingdoms;
Joscelyn for me!

Pale, at its ghastly noon,
Pauses above the death-still wood the moon;
The night-sprite, sighing, through the dim air stirs;
The clouds descend in rain;
Mourning, the wan stars wane,
Flickering like dying lamps in sepulchres!
Haggard as spectres vision-like and dumb,
Dark with the pomp of death, and moving slow,
Towards that sad lair the pale procession come
Where the grave closes on the night below.

With dim, deep-sunken eye,
Crutched on his staff, who trembles tottering by?
As wrung from out the shattered heart, one groan
Breaks the deep hush alone!
Crushed by the iron fate, he seems to gather
All life's last strength to stagger to the bier,
And hearken Do these cold lips murmur "Father?"
The sharp rain, drizzling through that place of fear,
...

When man from Paradise was driven,
And thorns around his pathway sprung,
Sweet Mercy wandering there from heaven
Upon those thorns bright roses flung.

Aye, and as Justice cursed the ground,
She stole behind, unheard, unseen
And while the curses fell around,
She scattered seeds of joy between.

And thus, as evils sprung to light,
And spread, like weeds, their poisons wide,
Fresh healing plants came blooming bright,
And stood, to check them, side by side.

And now, though Eden blooms afar,
And man is exiled from its bowers,
Still mercy steals through bolt and bar,
And brings away its choicest flowers.

The very toil, the thorns of care,
That Heaven in wrath for sin imposes,
By mercy changed, no curses are
One brings us rest, t...

        I.

O Life! O Death! O God!
Have I not striven?
Have I not known thee, God,
As thy stars know Heaven?
Have I not held thee true,
True as thy deepest,
Sweet and immaculate blue,
Of nights that feel thy dew?
Have I not known thee true,
O God that keepest?


        II.

O God, my father, God!
Didst give me fire
To rise above the clod,
And soar, aspire!
What tho' I strive and strive,
And all my life says live,
The sneerful scorn of men
But beats it down again;
And, O! sun-centered high,
O God! grand poet!
Beneath thy tender sky
Each day new Keatses die,
And thou dost know it!


        III.

They know thee beautiful!
They know thee bitter!
And all their e...

What have we all forgotten, at the break of the seventh year?
With a nation born to the ages and a Bad Time borne on its bier!
Public robbing, and lying that death cannot erase,
“Private” strife and deception, Cover the bad dead face!
Drinking, gambling and madness, Cover and bear it away,
But what have we all forgotten at the dawn of the seventh day?

These are the years of plenty, years when the “tanks” are full,
Stacked by the lonely sidings mountains of wheat and wool.
Country crowds to the city, healthy, shaven and dressed,
Clothes to wear with the gayest, money to spend with the best.
Grand are the lights of the cities, carnival kings in power,
But what have we all forgotten, in this, the eleventh hour?

“We” have brought the states together, a land to the lands n...

In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunatly drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height.

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not flote upon his watry bear
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of som melod...

My wife is dead and I am free!
And I can guzzle all I want.
When I came home without a cent
Her crying knifed the heart in me.

I am as happy as a king;
The air is pure, the sky divine...
We had such sky another time
When first our love was blossoming!

The awful thirst I feel today
Would need, to get it rightly slaked,
All of the wine that it would take
To fill her tomb; - a lot to say:

I threw her in a well, and then
I even pitched some heavy stones
Out of the well-curb on her bones.
0, I'll forget her, if I can!

Naming those vows of tenderness
From which no power can set us free,
To reconcile us, as when we
Loved with a drunken happiness,

One night, along a road I named,
I begged her for a rendezvous.

The teasel and the horsemint spread
The hillside as with sunset, sown
With blossoms, o'er the Standing-Stone
That ripples in its rocky bed:
There are no treasuries that hold
Gold richer than the marigold
That crowns its sparkling head.

'Tis harvest time: a mower stands
Among the morning wheat and whets
His scythe, and for a space forgets
The labor of the ripening lands;
Then bends, and through the dewy grain
His long scythe hisses, and again
He swings it in his hands.

And she beholds him where he mows
On acres whence the water sends
Faint music of reflecting bends
And falls that interblend with flows:
She stands among the old bee-gums, -
Where all the apiary hums, -
A simple bramble-rose.

She hears him whistling as he...

Gold of the tangled wilderness of wattle,
Break in the lone green hollows of the hills,
Flame on the iron headlands of the ocean,
Gleam on the margin of the hurrying rills.

Come with thy saffron diadem and scatter
Odours of Araby that haunt the air,
Queen of our woodland, rival of the roses,
Spring in the yellow tresses of thy hair.

Surely the old gods, dwellers on Olympus,
Under thy shining loveliness have strayed,
Crowned with thy clusters, magical Apollo,
Pan with his reedy music may have played.

Surely within thy fastness, Aphrodite,
She of the sea-ways, fallen from above,
Wandered beneath thy canopy of blossom,
Nothing disdainful of a mortal’s love.

Aye, and Her sweet breath lingers on the wattle,
Aye, and Her myrtle dominates...

Thirty years have come and gone,
Melting away like Southern Snows,
Since, in the light of a summer's night,
I went to the garden to seek my Rose.

Mine! Do you hear it, silver moon,
Flooding my heart with your mellow shine?
Mine! Be witness, ye distant stars,
Looking on me with eyes divine!

Tell me, tell me, wandering winds,
Whisper it, if you may not speak--
Did you ever, in all your round,
Fan a lovelier brow or cheek?

Long I nursed in my heart the love,
Love which felt, but dared not tell,
Till, I scarcely know how or when--
It found wild words,- and all was well!

I can hear her sweet voice even now--
It makes my pulses leap and thrill--
"I owe you more than I well can pay;
You may take me, Robert, if you will!"

Toward even when the day leans down
    To kiss the upturned face of night,
Out just beyond the loud-voiced town
    I know a spot of calm delight.
Like crimson arrows from a quiver
    The red rays pierce the waters flowing
While we go dreaming, singing, rowing
    To Leudemann's-on-the-River.

The hills, like some glad mocking-bird,
    Send back our laughter and our singing,
While faint - and yet more faint is heard
    The steeple bells all sweetly ringing.
Some message did the winds deliver
    To each glad heart that August night,
All heard, but all heard not aright;
    By Leudemann's-on-the-River.

Night falls as in some foreign clime,
    Between the hills that slope and rise.
So dusk the shades at landing time,
    We could n...

What are these bustlers at the gate
Of now or yesterday,
These playthings in the hand of Fate,
That pass, and point no way;

These clinging bubbles whose mock fires
For ever dance and gleam,
Vain foam that gathers and expires
Upon the world's dark stream;

These gropers betwixt right and wrong,
That seek an unknown goal,
Most ignorant, when they seem most strong;
What are they, then, O Soul,

That thou shouldst covet overmuch
A tenderer range of heart,
And yet at every dreamed-of touch
So tremulously start?

Thou with that hatred ever new
Of the world's base control,
That vision of the large and true,
That quickness of the soul;

Nay, for they are not of thy kind,
But in a rarer clay
God dowered thee with ...

Man has explored all countries and all lands,
And made his own the secrets of each clime.
Now, ere the world has fully reached its prime,
The oval earth lies compassed with steel bands,
The seas are slaves to ships that touch all strands,
    And even the haughty elements, sublime
    And bold, yield him their secrets for all time,
And speed like lackeys forth at his commands.

Still, though he search from shore to distant shore,
    And no strange realms, no unlocated plains
Are left for his attainment and control,
Yet is there one more kingdom to explore.
    Go, know thyself, O man! there yet remains
The undiscovered country of thy soul!

Behold; the Balance in the sky
Swift on the wintry scale inclines:
To earthy caves the Dryads fly,
And the bare pastures Pan resigns.
Late did the farmer's fork o'erspread
With recent soil the twice-mown mead,
Tainting the bloom which autumn knows:
He whets the rusty coulter now,
He binds his oxen to the plough,
And wide his future harvest throws.
Now, London's busy confines round,
By Kensington's imperial towers,
From Highgate's rough descent profound,
Essexian heaths, or Kentish bowers,
Where'er I pass, I see approach
Some rural statesman's eager coach
Hurried by senatorial cares:
While rural nymphs (alike, within,
Aspiring courtly praise to win)
Debate their dress, reform their airs.
Say, what can now the country boast,
O Drake, thy...

Rifted mountains, clad with forests, girded round by gleaming pines,
Where the morning, like an angel, robed in golden splendour shines;
Shimmering mountains, throwing downward on the slopes a mazy glare
Where the noonday glory sails through gulfs of calm and glittering air;
Stately mountains, high and hoary, piled with blocks of amber cloud,
Where the fading twilight lingers, when the winds are wailing loud;
Grand old mountains, overbeetling brawling brooks and deep ravines,
Where the moonshine, pale and mournful, flows on rocks and evergreens.

Underneath these regal ridges underneath the gnarly trees,
I am sitting, lonely-hearted, listening to a lonely breeze!
Sitting by an ancient casement, casting many a longing look
Out across the hazy gloaming out beyond the brawling brook...

AT the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful, fortress'd house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks from the keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks with a whisper,
Set ope the doors, O Soul!

Tenderly! be not impatient!
(Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh!
Strong is your hold, O love.)