Identity

See Plutarch.
Serene, and fitted to embrace,
Where'er he turned, a swan-like grace
Of haughtiness without pretence,
And to unfold a still magnificence,
Was princely Dion, in the power
And beauty of his happier hour.
And what pure homage then did wait
On Dion's virtues, while the lunar beam
Of Plato's genius, from its lofty sphere,
Fell round him in the grove of Academe,
Softening their inbred dignity austere
That he, not too elate
With self-sufficing solitude,
But with majestic lowliness endued,
Might in the universal bosom reign,
And from affectionate observance gain
Help, under every change of adverse fate.

Five thousand warriors O the rapturous day!
Each crowned with flowers, and armed with spear and shield,
Or ruder weapon which t...

Weary of jangling noises never stilled,
The skeptic's sneer, the bigot's hate, the din
Of clashing texts, the webs of creed men spin
Round simple truth, the children grown who build
With gilded cards their new Jerusalem,
Busy, with sacerdotal tailorings
And tinsel gauds, bedizening holy things,
I turn, with glad and grateful heart, from them
To the sweet story of the Florentine
Immortal in her blameless maidenhood,
Beautiful as God's angels and as good;
Feeling that life, even now, may be divine
With love no wrong can ever change to hate,
No sin make less than all-compassionate

Out of the mid-wood's twilight
Into the meadow's dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!

He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!

O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!

So much time has passed
& time is a hooligan run wild
littering the streets,
squeezing toothpaste at the wrong end
shredding clothes with a razor blade.

Time is never called into account    -
lives like Peter Pan
in a flying abode above it all
scot-free, the surly bandit.

A perilous acquisition    -
tiny pinpricks above the eye-brows
crows' feet
-    all too visible rending of
fleshy corners bulbed
to puffiness.

Red-handed,
I caught time
his knife in Youth once more
still-water decay,
brackish trouble-maker
with tint of rouge and gray.

This school-yard tough
still picking on the corner weakling.
braggadocio and upstart
spoiling for a fight
first elbow up,
each foot in a fray.

If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.
A man
Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought
In his full hands what, had they only known,
Had given their children’s children loftier thought,
Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,
And insult heaped upon him for his pains
And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
An old foul mouth that slandered you had set
The pack upon him.

Let not my love be call’d idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confin’d,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
‘Fair, kind, and true,’ is all my argument,
‘Fair, kind, and true,’ varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often liv’d alone,
Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

When I tell a tale of virtue and of injured innocence,
Then my publishers and lawyers are the densest of the dense:
With the blank face of an image and the nod of keep-it-dark
And a wink of mighty meaning at their confidential clerk.

(When, Oh! tell me when shall poets cease to be misunderstood?
When, Oh! When? shall people reckon rhymers can be any good?
Do their work and pay their debts and drink their pint of beer, and then,
Look in woman’s eyes and leave them, just like ordinary men?)

“Is there literary friendship ’twix the sexes? don’t you think?”
And they wink their idiotic and exasperating wink.
“Can’t we kiss a clever woman without wanting any more?”
And their clock-work nod is only more decided than before.

But if I should hint that there’s a little wom...

'What art thou, Presumptuous, who profanest
The wreath to mighty poets only due,
Even whilst like a forgotten moon thou wanest?
Touch not those leaves which for the eternal few
Who wander o'er the Paradise of fame,
In sacred dedication ever grew:
One of the crowd thou art without a name.'
'Ah, friend, 'tis the false laurel that I wear;
Bright though it seem, it is not the same
As that which bound Milton's immortal hair;
Its dew is poison; and the hopes that quicken
Under its chilling shade, though seeming fair,
Are flowers which die almost before they sicken.'

    Her emerald top
    phosphorescent candy glow
    stick candy,
    sno' cane -
    floss like
    the mane revealed beneath,
    spun hair matted/woven into
    icicle lengths & pubis mink.

    Her presence as a monk sliding
    under a cowl, jet-black velvet
    or midnight eye-liner shadow
    knotting strands of dark.

    She comes on waves -
    candelabra is a name
    deft movement of finger
    caressing storm, bare legs
    shining wet street lamps
    decantered ambered wine.

    Cigarette floating between lips,
    uncharted voyage of the smile
    where puffs of smoke
    are parrots' wings,
    incandescent show-girls
    in novelty across the flame.

We set no right above hers,
No earthly light nor star,
She hath had many lovers,
But not as lovers are:
They all were gallant fellows
And died all deaths for her,
And never one was jealous
But comrades true they were.

Oh! each one is a brother,
Though all the lands they claim,
For her or for each other
They’ve died all deaths the same
Young, handsome, old and ugly,
Free, married or divorced,
Where springtime bard or Thug lie
Her lover’s feet have crossed.

’Mid buttercups and daisies
With fair girls by their side,
Young poets sang her praises
While day in starlight died.
In smoke and fire and dust, and
With red eyes maniac like,
Those same young poets thrust and,
Wrenched out the reeking pike!

She is as ...

I.

When in the pansy-purpled stain
Of sunset one far star is seen,
Like some bright drop of rain,
Out of the forest, deep and green,
O'er me at Spirit seems to lean,
The fairest of her train.

II.

The Spirit, dowered with fadeless youth,
Of Lay and Legend, young as when,
Close to her side, in sooth,
She led me from the marts of men,
A child, into her world, which then
To me was true as truth.

III.

Her hair is like the silken husk
That holds the corn, and glints and glows;
Her brow is white as tusk;
Her body like a wilding rose,
And through her gossamer raiment shows
Like starlight closed in musk.

IV.

She smiles at me; she nods at me;
And by her looks I am beguiled
Into the mystery...

When peevish flaws his soul have stirred
    To fretful tears for crossed desires,
Obedient to his mother's word
    My child to banishment retires.

As disappears the moon, when wind
    Heaps miles of mist her visage o'er,
So vanisheth his face behind
    The cloud of his white pinafore.

I cannot then come near my child--
    A gulf between of gainful loss;
He to the infinite exiled--
    I waiting, for I cannot cross.

Ah then, what wonder, passing show,
    The Isis-veil behind it brings--
Like that self-coffined creatures know,
    Remembering legs, foreseeing wings!

Mysterious moment! When or how
    Is the bewildering change begun?
Hid in far deeps the awful now
    When turns his being to the sun!

A light...

DECEMBER 28, 1879.

A dim, vague shrinking haunts my soul,
    My spirit bodeth ill--
As some far-off restraining bank
Had burst, and waters, many a rank,
    Were marching on my hill;

As if I had no fire within
    For thoughts to sit about;
As if I had no flax to spin,
No lamp to lure the good things in
    And keep the bad things out.

The wind, south-west, raves in the pines
    That guard my cottage round;
The sea-waves fall in stormy lines
Below the sandy cliffs and chines,
    And swell the roaring sound.

The misty air, the bellowing wind
    Not often trouble me;
The storm that's outside of the mind
Doth oftener wake my heart to find
    More peace and liberty.

Why is not such my fate to-night?
...

    This door you might not open, and you did;
        So enter now, and see for what slight thing
    You are betrayed. . . .    Here is no treasure hid,
        No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
    The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
        For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
    But only what you see. . . .    Look yet again--
        An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
    Yet this alone out of my life I kept
        Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
    And you did so profane me when you crept
        Unto the threshold of this room to-night
    That I must never more behold your face.
        This now is yours.    I seek another place.

    From the shores of the Atlantic to the gardens of Japan,
    From the darkness of the Neva to the courts of Ispahan,
    There is nothing that can hold us, hold our wandering caravan.

    Leisurely is our encamping; nowhere pause in hasty flight.
    Long enough to learn the secret, and the value, and the might,
    Whether of the northern mountains or the southern lands of light.

    And the riches of the regions will be ours from land to land,
    Falling as a wiling booty under our marauding hand,
    Rugs from Persia, gods from China, emeralds from Samarcand!

    And the old forgotten empires, which have faded turn by turn,
    From the shades emerging slowly to their ancient sway return,
    And to their imperial manhood rise the ashes from the urn.

He lived beyond men, and so stood
Admitted to the brotherhood
Of beauty: dreams, with which he trod
Companioned like some sylvan god.
And oft men wondered, when his thought
Made all their knowledge seem as naught,
If he, like Uther's mystic son,
Had not been born for Avalon.
When wandering mid the whispering trees,
His soul communed with every breeze;
Heard voices calling from the glades,
Bloom-words of the Leimoniäds;
Or Dryads of the ash and oak,
Who syllabled his name and spoke
With him of presences and powers
That glimpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers.
By every violet-hallowed brook,
Where every bramble-matted nook
Rippled and laughed with water sounds,
He walked like one on sainted grounds,
Fearing intrusion on the spell
That k...

The day and its delights are done;
So all delights and days expire:
Down in the dim, sad West the sun
Is dying like a dying fire.

The fiercest lances of his light
Are spent; I watch him droop and die
Like a great king who falls in fight;
None dared the duel of his eye

Living, but, now his eye is dim,
The eyes of all may stare at him.

How lovely in his strength at morn
He orbed along the burning blue!
The blown gold of his flying hair
Was tangled in green-tressèd trees,
And netted in the river sand
In gleaming links of amber clear;
But all his shining locks are shorn,
His brow of its bright crown is bare,
The golden sceptre leaves his hand,
And deeper, darker, grows the hue
Of the dim purple draperies
And cloudy banner...

As when a beauteous nymph decays,
We say she's past her dancing days;
So poets lose their feet by time,
And can no longer dance in rhyme.
Your annual bard had rather chose
To celebrate your birth in prose:
Yet merry folks, who want by chance
A pair to make a country dance,
Call the old housekeeper, and get her
To fill a place for want of better:
While Sheridan is off the hooks,
And friend Delany at his books,
That Stella may avoid disgrace,
Once more the Dean supplies their place.
    Beauty and wit, too sad a truth!
Have always been confined to youth;
The god of wit and beauty's queen,
He twenty-one and she fifteen,
No poet ever sweetly sung,
Unless he were, like Phoebus, young;
Nor ever nymph inspired to rhyme,
Unless, like Venus, in...