Identity

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist
And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge, I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge, I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

The sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye;
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet
As hid all measure of the feat.

Thou in truth shouldst be one, yet not with the whole shouldst thou be so.
'Tis through the reason thou'rt one, art so with it through the heart.
Voice of the whole is thy reason, but thou thine own heart must be ever;
If in thy heart reason dwells evermore, happy art thou.

O God! my God! have mercy now.
I faint, I fall. Men say that Thou
Didst die for me, for such as me,
Patient of ill, and death, and scorn,
And that my sin was as a thorn
Among the thorns that girt Thy brow,
Wounding Thy soul.–That even now,
In this extremest misery
Of ignorance, I should require
A sign! and if a bolt of fire
Would rive the slumbrous summer noon
While I do pray to Thee alone,
Think my belief would stronger grow!
Is not my human pride brought low?
The boastings of my spirit still?
The joy I had in my free-will
All cold, and dead, and corpse-like grown?
And what is left to me but Thou,
And faith in Thee? Men pass me by;
Christians with happy countenances–
And children all seem full of Thee!
And women smile with saint-like ...

Your own fair youth, you care so little for it,
    Smiling towards Heaven, you would not stay the advances
    Of time and change upon your happiest fancies.
I keep your golden hour, and will restore it.

If ever, in time to come, you would explore it--
    Your old self whose thoughts went like last year's pansies,
    Look unto me; no mirror keeps its glances;
In my unfailing praises now I store it.

To keep all joys of yours from Time's estranging,
    I shall be then a treasury where your gay,
            Happy, and pensive past for ever is.

I shall be then a garden charmed from changing,
    In which your June has never passed away.
            Walk there awhile among my memories.

I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers,
Full of sweet trees and colour of glad grass,
In midst whereof there was
A lady clothed like summer with sweet hours.
Her beauty, fervent as a fiery moon,
Made my blood burn and swoon
Like a flame rained upon.
Sorrow had filled her shaken eyelids’ blue,
And her mouth’s sad red heavy rose all through
Seemed sad with glad things gone.

She held a little cithern by the strings,
Shaped heartwise, strung with subtle-coloured hair
Of some dead lute-player
That in dead years had done delicious things.
The seven strings were named accordingly;
The first string charity,
The second tenderness,
The rest were pleasure, sorrow, sleep, and sin,
And loving-kindness, that is pity’s kin
And is most pitiless.

A dewy flower, bathed in crimson light,
May touch the soul--a pure and beauteous sight;
A golden river flashing 'neath the sun,
May reach the spot where life's dark waters run;
Yet, when the sun is gone, the splendor dies,
With drooping head the tender flower lies.
And such is life; a golden mist of light,
A tangled web that glitters in the sun;
When shadows come, the glory takes its flight,
The treads are dark and worn, and life is done.
Oh! tears, that chill us like the dews of eve,
Why come unbid--why should we ever grieve?
Why is it, though life hath its leaves of gold,
The book each day some sorrow must unfold!
What human heart with truth can dare to say
No grief is mine--this is a perfect day?
Oh! poet, take your harp of gold and sing,
And all the e...

To G. E. M.

    'Tis a little room, my friend--
Baby walks from end to end;
All the things look sadly real
This hot noontide unideal;
Vaporous heat from cope to basement
All you see outside the casement,
Save one house all mud-becrusted,
And a street all drought-bedusted!
There behold its happiest vision,
Trickling water-cart's derision!
Shut we out the staring space,
Draw the curtains in its face!

    Close the eyelids of the room,
Fill it with a scarlet gloom:
Lo, the walls with warm flush dyed!
Lo, the ceiling glorified,
As when, lost in tenderest pinks,
White rose on the red rose thinks!
But beneath, a hue right rosy,
Red as a geranium-posy,
Stains the air with power estranging,
Known with unknown clouding, changin...

I

Into the shadow-white chamber silts the white
Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night
Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts
A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,
Till petals heaped between the window-shafts
    In a drift die there.

A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed pane
Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely stain
The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed
That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest
Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead
    Stretched out at rest.

Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed
The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.
Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again
With wounds between them, and suffering like a guest
That will no...

Bands of dark and bands of light
Lie athwart the homeward way;
Now we cross a belt of Night,
Now a strip of shining Day!

Now it is a month of June,
Now December's shivering hour;
Now rides high loved memories' Moon,
Now the Dark is dense with power!

Summers, winters, days, and nights,
Moons, and clouds, they come and go;
Joys and sorrows, pains, delights,
Hope and fear, and yes and no.

All is well: come, girls and boys,
Not a weary mile is vain!
Hark--dim laughter's radiant noise!
See the windows through the rain!

        Do you remember one immortal
        Lost moment out of time and space,
        What time we thought, who passed the portal
        Of that divine disastrous place
        Where Life was slain and Truth was slandered
        On that one holier hill than Rome,
        How far abroad our bodies wandered
        That evening when our souls came home?

        The mystic city many-gated,
        With monstrous columns, was your own:
        Herodian stones fell down and waited
        Two thousand years to be your throne.
        In the grey rocks the burning blossom
        Glowed terrible as the sacred blood:
        It was no stranger to your bosom
        Than bluebells of an English wood.

        Do you remember a road that follows
   ...

    Content Primroses,
    With hearts at rest in your thick leaves' soft care,
    Peeping as from his mother's lap the child
    Who courts shy shelter from his own open air!--
    Hanging Harebell,
    Whose blue heaven to no wanderer ever closes,
    Though thou still lookest earthward from thy domed cell!--
    Fluttering-wild
    Anemone, so well
    Named of the Wind, to whom thou, fettered-free,
    Yieldest thee, helpless--wilfully,
    With Take me or leave me,
    Sweet Wind, I am thine own Anemone!--
    Thirsty Arum, ever dreaming
    Of lakes in wildernesses gleaming!--
    Fire-winged Pimpernel,
    Communing with some hidden well,
    And secrets with the sun-god holding,
    At fixed hour folding and unfolding!--
    How ...

Form 991785, Sub-Section D


The Roman threw us a road, a road,
And sighed and strolled away:
The Saxon gave us a raid, a raid,
A raid that came to stay;
The Dane went west, but the Dane confessed
That he went a bit too far;
And we all became, by another name,
The Imperial race we are.

Chorus

The Imperial race, the inscrutable race,
The invincible race we are.

Though Sussex hills are bare, are bare,
And Sussex weald is wide,
From Chichester to Chester
Men saw the Norman ride;
He threw his sword in the air and sang
To a sort of a light guitar;
It was all the same, for we all became
The identical nobs we are.

Chorus

The identical nobs, individual nobs
Unmistakable nobs we ...

        We sang old love-songs on the way
            In sad and merry snatches,
        Your fingers o'er the strings astray
            Strumming the random catches.

        And ever, as the skiff plied on
            Among the trailing willows,
        Trekking the darker deeps to shun
            The gleaming sandy shallows,

        It seemed that we had, ages gone,
            In some far summer weather,
        When this same faery moonlight shone,
            Sung these same songs together.

        And every grassy cape we passed,
            And every reedy island,
        Even the bank'd cloud in the west
            That loomed a sombre highland;

        And you, with dewmist on your hair,
            Crowned with a wreat...

How many times must I jingle my little bells
And kiss your ugly forehead, shabby substitute?
How many, 0 my quiver, spears and bolts to lose
Trying to hit the target, nature's mystic self?

We will wear out our souls concocting subtle schemes,
And we'll be wrecking heavy armatures we've done
Before we gaze upon the great and wondrous One,
For whom we've often sobbed, wracked by the devil's dreams!

But some have never known their Idol face to face
These poor, accursed sculptors, marked by their disgrace,
Who go to beat themselves about the breast and brow,

Have only but a hope, strange sombre Capitol!
It is that Death, a new and hovering sun, will find
A way to bring to bloom the flowers of their minds!

I lay upon the headland-height, and listened
To the incessant sobbing of the sea
    In caverns under me,
And watched the waves, that tossed and fled and glistened,
Until the rolling meadows of amethyst
    Melted away in mist.

Then suddenly, as one from sleep, I started;
For round about me all the sunny capes
    Seemed peopled with the shapes
Of those whom I had known in days departed,
Apparelled in the loveliness which gleams
    On faces seen in dreams.

A moment only, and the light and glory
Faded away, and the disconsolate shore
    Stood lonely as before;
And the wild-roses of the promontory
Around me shuddered in the wind, and shed
    Their petals of pale red.

There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things the...

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned


along the inlet shore:


it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit


continuous overcast:


the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:


I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
swerves of action

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy ...