Identity

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled
Above the tide of hours, trouble the air,
And God's bell buoyed to be the water's care;
While hushed from fear, or loud with hope, a band
With blown, spray-dabbled hair gather at hand,
i(Turn if you may from battles never done,)
I call, as they go by me one by one,
i(Danger no refuge holds, and war no peace,)
i(For him who hears love sing and never cease,)
i(Beside her clean-swept hearth, her quiet shade:)
i(But gather all for whom no love hath made)
i(A woven silence, or but came to cast)
i(A song into the air, and singing passed)
i(To smile on the pale dawn; and gather you)
i(Who have sought more than is in rain or dew,)
i(Or in the sun and moon, or on the earth,)

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes ...

La bella donna che cotanto amavi.

TO HIS BROTHER GERARDO, ON THE DEATH OF A LADY TO WHOM HE WAS ATTACHED.


    The beauteous lady thou didst love so well
Too soon hath from our regions wing'd her flight,
To find, I ween, a home 'mid realms of light;
So much in virtue did she here excel
Thy heart's twin key of joy and woe can dwell
No more with her--then re-assume thy might,
Pursue her by the path most swift and right,
Nor let aught earthly stay thee by its spell.
Thus from thy heaviest burthen being freed,
Each other thou canst easier dispel,
And an unfreighted pilgrim seek thy sky;
Too well, thou seest, how much the soul hath need,
(Ere yet it tempt the shadowy vale) to quell
Each earthly hope, since all that lives must die.

WOLL...

I know that he exists
Somewhere, in silence.
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

'T is an instant's play,
'T is a fond ambush,
Just to make bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But should the play
Prove piercing earnest,
Should the glee glaze
In death's stiff stare,

Would not the fun
Look too expensive?
Would not the jest
Have crawled too far?

While I sit beside the window
I can hear the pigeons coo,
That the air is warm and blue,
And how well the young bird flew -
Then I fold my arms and scold the heart
That thought the pigeons knew.

While I sit beside the window
I can watch the flowers grow
Till the seeds are ripe and blow
To the fruitful earth below -
Then I shut my eyes and tell my heart
The flowers cannot know.

While I sit beside the window
I am growing old and drear;
Does it matter what I hear,
What I see, or what I fear?
I can fold my hands and hush my heart
That is straining to a tear.

The earth is gay with leaf and flower,
The fruit is ripe upon the tree,
The pigeons coo in the swinging bower,
But I sit wearily
Watching a beggar-woman nurse

I.

A cat is strolling through my mind
Acting as though he owned the place,
A lovely cat-strong, charming, sweet.
When he meows, one scarcely hears,

So tender and discreet his tone;
But whether he should growl or purr
His voice is always rich and deep.
That is the secret of his charm.

This purling voice that filters down
Into my darkest depths of soul
Fulfils me like a balanced verse,
Delights me as a potion would.

It puts to sleep the cruellest ills
And keeps a rein on ecstasies
Without the need for any words
It can pronounce the longest phrase.

Oh no, there is no bow that draws
Across my heart, fine instrument,
And makes to sing so royally
The strongest and the purest chord,

More than your voice, my...

All day long there has haunted me
    A spectre out of my lost youth-land.
Because I happened last night to see
    A woman's beautiful snow-white hand.

Like part of a statue broken away,
    And carefully kept in a velvet case,
On the crimson rim of her box it lay;
    The folds of the curtain hid her face.

Years had drifted between us two,
    In another clime, in another land,
We had lived and parted, and yet I knew
    That cruelly beautiful perfect hand.

The ringless beauty of fingers fine,
    The sea-shell tint of their taper tips,
The sight of them stirred my blood like wine,
    Oh, to hold them again to my lips!

To feel their tender touch on my hair,
    Their mute caress, and their clinging hold;
Oh for the past tha...

From the cool and dark-lipped furrows
    breathes a dim delight
Aureoles of joy encircle
    every blade of grass
Where the dew-fed creatures silent
    and enraptured pass:
And the restless ploughman pauses,
    turns, and wondering
Deep beneath his rustic habit
    finds himself a king;
For a fiery moment looking
    with the eyes of God
Over fields a slave at morning
    bowed him to the sod.
Blind and dense with revelation
    every moment flies,
And unto the Mighty Mother
    gay, eternal, rise
All the hopes we hold, the gladness,
    dreams of things to be.
One of all they generations,
    Mother, hails to thee!
Hail! and hail! and hail for ever:
    though I turn again
For they joy unto the human
    vesture...

I.

My heart sank with our Claret-flask,
Just now, beneath the heavy sedges
That serve this Pond’s black face for mask
And still at yonder broken edges
Of the hole, where up the bubbles glisten,
After my heart I look and listen.

II.

Our laughing little flask, compelled
Thro’ depth to depth more bleak and shady;
As when, both arms beside her held,
Feet straightened out, some gay French lady
Is caught up from Life’s light and motion,
And dropped into Death’s silent ocean!



Up jumped Tokay on our table,
Like a pygmy castle-warder,
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
Arms and accoutrements all in order;
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South,
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
Cocked his flap...

Immortal clothing I put on
So soon as, Julia, I am gone
To mine eternal mansion.

Thou, thou art here, to human sight
Clothed all with incorrupted light;
But yet how more admir'dly bright

Wilt thou appear, when thou art set
In thy refulgent thronelet,
That shin'st thus in thy counterfeit!

Good fellows are laughing and drinking
(To-night no heart should grieve),
But I am of old days thinking,
Alone, on Christmas Eve.
Old memories fast are springing
To life again; old rhymes
Once more in my brain are ringing,
Ah, God be with old times!

There never was man so lonely
But ghosts walked him beside,
For Death our spirits can only
By veils of sense divide.
Numberless as the blades of
Grass in the fields that grow,
Around us hover the shades of
The dead of long ago.

Friends living a word estranges;
We smile, and we say “Adieu!”
But, whatsoever else changes,
Dead friends are faithful and true.
An old-time tune, or a flower,
The simplest thing held dear
In bygone days has the power
Once more to bring them nea...

    Like a thousan' birds o' brightness from the isles o' summer seas,
    Rickollections, full o' gladness, come with songs and lullabies,
    An' I listen to the carols that with gentle voices roll,
    Full o' tenderness an' beauty, down upon my weary soul,
    Fer thar's one thet keeps a-singin' with a song thet's never done,
    An' I see the bendin' willers on the banks o' Turkey Run.

    An' agin' I be a youngster with a youngster's foolin' dreams,
    With his high-falutin' notions an' his fiddle-faddle schemes;
    With the laughin' an' the cryin', with the sorrow an' the joy,
    Thet is jumbled up together in the bosom o' the boy;
    An' agin my arly fancies in a fairy loom are spun
    Underneath the dancin' shadders on the banks o' Turkey Run.

    An' ag...

The blackened walnut in its spicy hull
        Rots where it fell;
And, in the orchard, where the trees stand full,
        The pear's ripe bell
Drops; and the log-house in the bramble lane,
        From whose low door
Stretch yellowing acres of the corn and cane,
        He sees once more.

The cat-bird sings upon its porch of pine;
        And o'er its gate,
All slender-podded, twists the trumpet-vine,
        A leafy weight;
And in the woodland, by the spring, mayhap,
        With eyes of joy
Again he bends to set a rabbit-trap,
        A brown-faced boy.

Then, whistling, through the underbrush he goes,
        Out of the wood,
Where, with young cheeks, red as an Autumn rose,
        Beneath her hood,
His sweetheart wai...

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded, to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
Her only life the noises that she mocks.

All things are shadows of thee, Lord;
    The sun himself is but thy shade;
My spirit is the shadow of thy word,
    A thing that thou hast said.

Diamonds are shadows of the sun,
    They gleam as after him they hark:
My soul some arrows of thy light hath won.
    And feebly fights the dark!

All knowledges are broken shades,
    In gulfs of dark a scattered horde:
Together rush the parted glory-grades--
    Then, lo, thy garment, Lord!

My soul, the shadow, still is light
    Because the shadow falls from thee;
I turn, dull candle, to the centre bright,
    And home flit shadowy.

Shine, Lord; shine me thy shadow still;
    The brighter I, the more thy shade!
My motion be thy lovely moveless will!
    My darkness, light del...

    Oh you who have daring deeds to tell!
    And you who have felt Ambition's spell!
    Have you heard of the louse who longed to dwell
    In the golden hair of a queen?
    He sighed all day and he sighed all night,
    And no one could understand it quite,
    For the head of a slut is a louse's delight,
    But he pined for the head of a queen.

    So he left his kinsfolk in merry play,
    And off by his lonesome he stole away,
    From the home of his youth so bright and gay,
    And gloriously unclean.
    And at last he came to the palace gate,
    And he made his way in a manner straight
    (For a louse may go where a man must wait)
    To the tiring-room of the queen.

    The queen she spake to her tiring-maid:
    "There's someth...

I Thought no more was needed
Youth to prolong
Than dumb-bell and foil
To keep the body young.
Oh, who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

Though I have many words,
What woman’s satisfied,
I am no longer faint
Because at her side?
Oh, who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

I have not lost desire
But the heart that I had,
I thought ’twould burn my body
Laid on the death-bed.
But who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?