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Page 227 of 1418

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Page 227 of 1418

The Night Watch

Beneath the trees with heedful step and slow
At night I go,
Fearful upon their whispering to break
Lest they awake
Out of those dreams of heavenly light that fill
Their branches still
With a soft murmur of memoried ecstasy.
There 'neath each tree
Nightlong a spirit watches, and I feel
His breath unseal
The fast-shut thoughts and longings of tired day,
That flutter away
Mothlike on luminous soft wings and frail
And moonlike pale.
There in the flowering chestnuts' bowering gloom
And limes' perfume
Wandering wavelike through the moondrawn night
That heaves toward light,
There hang I my dark thoughts and deeper prayers;
And as the airs
Of star-kissed dawn come stirring and o'er-creep
The ford of sleep,
Thy shape, great Love, grows sha...

John Frederick Freeman

At The Red Throat

    In youth, Death was
a puny boy possessing but
wormy hands & fleshless fingers
as in Witch Hazel
or Scrooge's Future Ghost
- that insipid Evil One
Hansel so easily outwitted
in a gingerbread house.

Time brought increased notoriety.
Saucy times with a soupçon of respect
for the artful dodger.
Givens change, an armful of
orange lilies, limp & loathsome,
on a tombstone door
before trumpets of rain.

Graven images. Lifeless stone.
Death became stone.
Stone empty. The maggot emptiness
burrowing into chiselled easel and
the stone-cutter's savage magic.
Just a bitty stone
to herald a passing.

Night-jars.
Old straw-...

Paul Cameron Brown

Mater Dolorosa

I’d a dream to-night
As I fell asleep,
O! the touching sight
Makes me still to weep:
Of my little lad,
Gone to leave me sad,
Ay, the child I had,
But was not to keep.

As in heaven high,
I my child did seek,
There in train came by
Children fair and meek,
Each in lily white,
With a lamp alight;
Each was clear to sight,
But they did not speak.

Then, a little sad,
Came my child in turn,
But the lamp he had,
O it did not burn!
He, to clear my doubt,
Said, half turn’d about,
‘Your tears put it out;
Mother, never mourn.’

William Barnes

A Wintry Sonnet.

A robin said: The Spring will never come,
And I shall never care to build again.
A Rosebush said: These frosts are wearisome,
My sap will never stir for sun or rain.
The half Moon said: These nights are fogged and slow,
I neither care to wax nor care to wane.
The Ocean said: I thirst from long ago,
Because earth's rivers cannot fill the main.
When springtime came, red Robin built a nest,
And trilled a lover's song in sheer delight.
Gray hoarfrost vanished, and the Rose with might
Clothed her in leaves and buds of crimson core.
The dim Moon brightened. Ocean sunned his crest,
Dimpled his blue, - yet thirsted evermore.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Narrative Verses, Written After An Excursion From Helpstone To Burghley Park

The faint sun tipt the rising ground,
No blustering wind, the air was still;
The blue mist, thinly scatter'd round,
Verg'd along the distant hill:
Delightful morn! from labour free
I jocund met the south-west gale,
While here and there a busy bee
Humm'd sweetly o'er the flow'ry vale.

O joyful morn! on pleasure bent,
Down the green slopes and fields I flew;
And through the thickest covert went,
Which hid me from the public view:
Nor was it shame, nor was it fear,
No, no, it was my own dear choice;
I love the briary thicket, where
Echo keeps her mocking voice.

The sun's increasing heat was kind,
His warm beams cheer'd the vales around:
I left my own fields far behind,
And, pilgrim-like, trod foreign ground;
The glowing landscape's...

John Clare

The Shadow of the Cross

        At the drowsy dusk when the shadows creep
From the golden west, where the sunbeams sleep,

An angel mused: "Is there good or ill
In the mad world's heart, since on Calvary's hill

'Round the cross a mid-day twilight fell
That darkened earth and o'ershadowed hell?"

Through the streets of a city the angel sped;
Like an open scroll men's hearts he read.

In a monarch's ear his courtiers lied
And humble faces hid hearts of pride.

Men's hate waxed hot, and their hearts grew cold,
As they haggled and fought for the lust of gold.

Despairing, he cried, "After all these years
Is there naught but hatred and strife and tears?"

...

John McCrae

Verses

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Christopher Dowson

To An Old Danish Song-Book

Welcome, my old friend,
Welcome to a foreign fireside,
While the sullen gales of autumn
Shake the windows.

The ungrateful world
Has, it seems, dealt harshly with thee,
Since, beneath the skies of Denmark,
First I met thee.

There are marks of age,
There are thumb-marks on thy margin,
Made by hands that clasped thee rudely,
At the alehouse.

Soiled and dull thou art;
Yellow are thy time-worn pages,
As the russet, rain-molested
Leaves of autumn.

Thou art stained with wine
Scattered from hilarious goblets,
As the leaves with the libations
Of Olympus.

Yet dost thou recall
Days departed, half-forgotten,
When in dreamy youth I wandered
By the Baltic,--

When I paused to hear
The old ballad...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Joyeuse Garde

The sun was heavy; no more shade at all
Than you might cover with a hollow cup
There was in the south chamber; wall by wall,
Slowly the hot noon filled the castle up.
One hand among the rushes, one let play
Where the loose gold began to swerve and droop
From his fair mantle to the floor, she lay;
Her face held up a little, for delight
To feel his eyes upon it, one would say.
Her grave shut lips were glad to be in sight
Of Tristram's kisses; she had often turned
Against her shifted pillows in the night
To lessen the sore pain wherein they burned
For want of Tristram; her great eyes had grown
Less keen and sudden, and a hunger yearned
Her sick face through, these wretched years agone.
Her eyes said "Tristram" now, but her lips held
The joy too close for any...

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Ego Dominus Tuus

Hic. On the grey sand beside the shallow stream
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
A lamp burns on beside the open book
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon
And though you have passed the best of life still trace
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion
Magical shapes.

Ille. By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.

Hic. And I would find myself and not an image.

Ille. That is our modern hope and by its light
We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush
We are but critics, or but half create,
Timid, entangled, empty and abashed
Lacking the countenance of our friends.<...

William Butler Yeats

Wincing

You can't go back,
to Love, a home.
memories of Pearl Bailey
even a scatterbrained job
curled like a Morning Glory
about the ribs of day.

Everyone repeats not going back.

A sly ripple on the cape of wind,
peaking with
absentminded glee,
into that bulge from within
your past, beyond your left arm,
called "before".

Dismissing angels, refusing to
court hardship, not to mention
wincing that comes from attaching
the mouth too fiercely on privale parts
and all flasks with firm memory;
wheeling drunkenly on her thought.
her sayings, sculling backwaters of your mind
with little fingers each repeating
sane warnings.

Paul Cameron Brown

The World - Sonnet

By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:
But all night as the moon so changeth she;
Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
By day she woos me to the outer air,
Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
But through the night, a beast she grins at me,
A very monster void of love and prayer.
By day she stands a lie: by night she stands
In all the naked horror of the truth
With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.
Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell
My soul to her, give her my life and youth,
Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell?

Christina Georgina Rossetti

The Last Farewell

LINES WRITTEN BY THE AUTHOR'S BROTHER, EDWARD BLISS EMERSON, WHILST SAILING OUT OF BOSTON HARBOR, BOUND FOR THE ISLAND OF PORTO RICO, IN 1832

Farewell, ye lofty spires
That cheered the holy light!
Farewell, domestic fires
That broke the gloom of night!
Too soon those spires are lost,
Too fast we leave the bay,
Too soon by ocean tost
From hearth and home away,
Far away, far away.

Farewell the busy town,
The wealthy and the wise,
Kind smile and honest frown
From bright, familiar eyes.
All these are fading now;
Our brig hastes on her way,
Her unremembering prow
Is leaping o'er the sea,
Far away, far away.

Farewell, my mother fond,
Too kind, too good to me;
Nor pearl nor diamond
Would pay my debt to thee.
But ev...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Moods

Time drops in decay,
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
What one in the rout
Of the fire-born moods,
Has fallen away?

William Butler Yeats

Humiliation

I have been so innerly proud, and so long alone,
Do not leave me, or I shall break.
Do not leave me.

What should I do if you were gone again
So soon?
What should I look for?
Where should I go?
What should I be, I myself,
"I"?
What would it mean, this
I?

Do not leave me.

What should I think of death?
If I died, it would not be you:
It would be simply the same
Lack of you.
The same want, life or death,
Unfulfilment,
The same insanity of space
You not there for me.

Think, I daren't die
For fear of the lack in death.
And I daren't live.

Unless there were a morphine or a drug.

I would bear the pain.
But always, strong, unremitting
It would make me not me.
The thing with my bo...

David Herbert Richards Lawrence

The Stag.

Blest be the boy, by virtue nurst,
Who knows not aught of fear's controul,
And keeps, in peril's sudden burst,
The freedom of an active soul.

Such was a lively Tuscan boy,
Who lived the youthful Tasso's friend,
Friendship and verse his early joy,
And music, form'd with love to blend.

Love had inspir'd his tender frame,
His years but two above eleven,
The sister of his friend his flame!
A lovely little light of Heaven!

Born in the same propitious year,
Together nurst, together taught;
Each learn'd to hold the other dear,
In perfect unison of thought.

Their forms, their talents, and their talk,
Seem'd match'd by some angelic powers,
Ne'er grew upon a rose's stalk
A sweeter pair of soc...

William Hayley

Perfidy

Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.

The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.

The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.

Two brown ponies trotting slowly
Stopped at a dim-lit trough to drink:
The dark van drummed down the distance slowly;
While the city stars so dim...

David Herbert Richards Lawrence

Rain Film

On the night of the rains,
water was oozing out from
the sky's swollen stitches,
a rash developed across
the meaning of the heavens.

The wooden floors of my attic place
strove for a deeper tone,
a hoarse calling
grew louder as I paced
trying to see rain.

I followed the gravity of the treasure hunt
where each bounce meant a slap
across a table top of tension,
where the window basted winter black rain
and silence paid another call.

I am as much as this water flower, rain.
I am as impressionable as the city that stops for rain.
And I lack the same substance that dooms water to be
a soft pillow feather; excepting this,
I may still shatter this thing, March routine existence
by dabbling in destruction.

Paul Cameron Brown

Page 227 of 1418

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Page 227 of 1418