Spirituality

Methinks that to some vacant hermitage
'My' feet would rather turn to some dry nook
Scooped out of living rock, and near a brook
Hurled down a mountain-cove from stage to stage,
Yet tempering, for my sight, its bustling rage
In the soft heaven of a translucent pool;
Thence creeping under sylvan arches cool,
Fit haunt of shapes whose glorious equipage
Would elevate my dreams. A beechen bowl,
A maple dish, my furniture should be;
Crisp, yellow leaves my bed; the hooting owl
My night-watch: nor should e'er the crested fowl
From thorp or vill his matins sound for me,
Tired of the world and all its industry.

1.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

2.
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are s...

A strength Thy service cannot tire,
A faith which doubt can never dim,
A heart of love, a lip of fire,
O Freedom's God! be Thou to him!
Speak through him words of power and fear,
As through Thy prophet bards of old,
And let a scornful people hear
Once more Thy Sinai-thunders rolled.
For lying lips Thy blessing seek,
And hands of blood are raised to Thee,
And on Thy children, crushed and weak,
The oppressor plants his kneeling knee.
Let then, O God! Thy servant dare
Thy truth in all its power to tell,
Unmask the priestly thieves, and tear
The Bible from the grasp of hell!
From hollow rite and narrow span
Of law and sect by Thee released,
Oh, teach him that the Christian man
Is holier than the Jewish priest.
Chase back the shadows, gray and o...

Nay, blame me not; I might have spared
Your patience many a trivial verse,
Yet these my earlier welcome shared,
So, let the better shield the worse.

And some might say, "Those ruder songs
Had freshness which the new have lost;
To spring the opening leaf belongs,
The chestnut-burs await the frost."

When those I wrote, my locks were brown,
When these I write - ah, well a-day!
The autumn thistle's silvery down
Is not the purple bloom of May.

Go, little book, whose pages hold
Those garnered years in loving trust;
How long before your blue and gold
Shall fade and whiten in the dust?

O sexton of the alcoved tomb,
Where souls in leathern cerements lie,
Tell me each living poet's doom!
How long before his book shall die?

O Ary Scheffer! when beneath thine eye,
Touched with the light that cometh from above,
Grew the sweet picture of the dear Lord's love,
No dream hadst thou that Christian hands would tear
Therefrom the token of His equal care,
And make thy symbol of His truth a lie!
The poor, dumb slave whose shackles fall away
In His compassionate gaze, grubbed smoothly out,
To mar no more the exercise devout
Of sleek oppression kneeling down to pray
Where the great oriel stains the Sabbath day!
Let whoso can before such praying-books
Kneel on his velvet cushion; I, for one,
Would sooner bow, a Parsee, to the sun,
Or tend a prayer-wheel in Thibetar brooks,
Or beat a drum on Yedo's temple-floor.
No falser idol man has bowed before,
In Indian groves or islands of the sea,

Too frail to keep the lofty vow
That must have followed when his brow
Was wreathed, "The Vision" tells us how
With holly spray,
He faltered, drifted to and fro,
And passed away.

Well might such thoughts, dear Sister, throng
Our minds when, lingering all too long,
Over the grave of Burns we hung
In social grief
Indulged as if it were a wrong
To seek relief.

But, leaving each unquiet theme
Where gentlest judgments may misdeem,
And prompt to welcome every gleam
Of good and fair,
Let us beside this limpid Stream
Breathe hopeful air.

Enough of sorrow, wreck, and blight;
Think rather of those moments bright
When to the consciousness of right
His course was true,
When Wisdom prospered in his sight
And virtue grew.<...

Ben posson gli occhi.


Well may these eyes of mine both near and far
        Behold the beams that from thy beauty flow;
        But, lady, feet must halt where sight may go:
        We see, but cannot climb to clasp a star.
The pure ethereal soul surmounts that bar
        Of flesh, and soars to where thy splendours glow,
        Free through the eyes; while prisoned here below,
        Though fired with fervent love, our bodies are.
Clogged with mortality and wingless, we
        Cannot pursue an angel in her flight:
        Only to gaze exhausts our utmost might.
Yet, if but heaven like earth incline to thee,
        Let my whole body be one eye to see,
        That not one part of me may miss thy sight!

So, this is all, the utmost reach
Of priestly power the mind to fetter!
When laymen think, when women preach,
A war of words, a "Pastoral Letter!"
Now, shame upon ye, parish Popes!
Was it thus with those, your predecessors,
Who sealed with racks, and fire, and ropes
Their loving-kindness to transgressors?
A "Pastoral Letter," grave and dull;
Alas! in hoof and horns and features,
How different is your Brookfield bull
From him who bellows from St. Peter's!
Your pastoral rights and powers from harm,
Think ye, can words alone preserve them?
Your wiser fathers taught the arm
And sword of temporal power to serve them.
Oh, glorious days, when Church and State
Were wedded by your spiritual fathers!
And on submissive shoulders sat
Your Wilsons and your C...

Poet:

"Why this fever why this sighing?
Why this restless longing dying
For a something dreamy something,
Undefined, and yet defying
All the pride and power of manhood?

"O these years of sin and sorrow!
Smiling while the iron harrow
Of a keen and biting longing
Tears and quivers in the marrow
Of my being every moment
Of my very inmost being.

"What to me the mad ambition
For men's praise and proud position
Struggling, fighting to the summit
Of its vain and earthly mission,
To lie down on bed of ashes
Bed of barren, bitter ashes?

"Cure this fever? I have tried it;
Smothered, drenched it and defied it
With a will of brass and iron;
Every smile and look denied it;
Yet it heeded not denying,
And it m...

With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid,
To southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb.
Only the crag and the cliff to nor’ward,
And the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,
And waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward
On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly,
And shores trod seldom by feet of men,
Where the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie,
They have lain embedded these long years ten.
Love! when we wander’d here together,
Hand in hand through the sparkling weather,
From the heights and hollows of fern and heather,
God surely loved us a little then.

The skies were fairer and shores were firmer,
The blue sea over th...

They walked the valley of the dead;
    Lit by a weird half light;
No sound they made, no word they said;
    And they were pale with fright.
Then suddenly from unseen places came
Loud laughter, that was like a whip of flame.

They looked, and saw, beyond, above,
    A land where wronged souls wait;
(Those spirits called to earth by love,
    And driven back by hate).
And each one stood in anguish dumb and wild,
As she beheld the phantom of her child.

Yea, saw the soul her wish had hurled
    Out into night and death;
Before it reached the Mother world,
    Or drew its natal breath.
And terrified, each hid her face and fled
Beyond the presence of her unborn dead.

And God's Great Angel, who provides
    Souls for our mortal land,...

Now had the sun to that horizon reach'd,
That covers, with the most exalted point
Of its meridian circle, Salem's walls,
And night, that opposite to him her orb
Sounds, from the stream of Ganges issued forth,
Holding the scales, that from her hands are dropp'd
When she reigns highest: so that where I was,
Aurora's white and vermeil-tinctur'd cheek
To orange turn'd as she in age increas'd.

Meanwhile we linger'd by the water's brink,
Like men, who, musing on their road, in thought
Journey, while motionless the body rests.
When lo! as near upon the hour of dawn,
Through the thick vapours Mars with fiery beam
Glares down in west, over the ocean floor;
So seem'd, what once again I hope to view,
A light so swiftly coming through the sea,
No winged course ...

Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
    One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
    Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine; -

Stars they are, wherein we read our history,
    As astrologers and seers of eld;
Yet not wrapped about with awful mystery,
    Like the burning stars, which they beheld.

Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,
    God hath written in those stars above;
But not less in the bright flowerets under us
    Stands the revelation of his love.

Bright and glorious is that revelation,
    Written all over this great world of ours;
Making evident our own creation,
    In these stars of earth, - these golden flowers.

And the Poet, faithful and far-seeing,
...

The Autumn promised, and he keeps
His word unto the meadow-rose.
The pure, bright lightnings herald Spring,
Serene and glad the fresh earth shows.
The rain has quenched her children's thirst,
Her cheeks, but now so cold and dry,
Are soft and fair, a laughing face;
With clouds of purple shines the sky,
Though filled with light, yet veiled with haze.
Hark! hark! the turtle's mocking note
Outsings the valley-pigeon's lays.
Her wings are gemmed, and from her throat,
When the clear sun gleams back again,
It seems to me as though she wore
About her neck a jewelled chain.
Say, wilt thou darken such a light,
Wilt drag the clouds from heaven's height?
Although thy heart with anger swell,
Yet firm as marble mine doth dwell.
Therein no fear thy wrath beget...

I love thee, Sabbath morn! - I cannot say
    But 'tis because my father loved thee so, -
    Because my mother's care-worn face would grow
So sweetly placid in thy peaceful ray; -

It may be, that is part of what endears
    Thee, Sabbath, to my soul; for memory stirs
    Old buried thoughts of his voice and of hers -
Heard never more on Earth - till sudden tears

So sadly sweet well up, I bid them flow,
    They leave a Sabbath in the soul when past;
    As when the sky, by April clouds o'ercast,
Shows fairer in the sun's returning glow.

I see the grass-grown lane we trod of old,
    Dear father, sainted mother! while
    The Sabbath sun looked down with loving smile,
And touched the hills and streams with rippling gold.

I hear y...

Of Prometheus, how undaunted
    On Olympus' shining bastions
His audacious foot he planted,
Myths are told and songs are chanted,
    Full of promptings and suggestions.

Beautiful is the tradition
    Of that flight through heavenly portals,
The old classic superstition
Of the theft and the transmission
    Of the fire of the Immortals!

First the deed of noble daring,
    Born of heavenward aspiration,
Then the fire with mortals sharing,
Then the vulture,--the despairing
    Cry of pain on crags Caucasian.

All is but a symbol painted
    Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer;
Only those are crowned and sainted
Who with grief have been acquainted,
    Making nations nobler, freer.

In their feverish exultations,
    In thei...

II. Continued

From Rite and Ordinance abused they fled
To Wilds where both were utterly unknown;
But not to them had Providence foreshown
What benefits are missed, what evils bred,
In worship neither raised nor limited
Save by Self-will. Lo! from that distant shore,
For Rite and Ordinance, Piety is led
Back to the Land those Pilgrims left of yore,
Led by her own free choice. So Truth and Love
By Conscience governed do their steps retrace.
Fathers! your Virtues, such the power of grace,
Their spirit, in your Children, thus approve.
Transcendent over time, unbound by place,
Concord and Charity in circles move.

When the leaves, by thousands thinned,
A thousand times have whirled in the wind,
And the moon, with hollow cheek,
Staring from her hollow height,
Consolation seems to seek
From the dim, reechoing night;
And the fog-streaks dead and white
Lie like ghosts of lost delight
O'er highest earth and lowest sky;
Then, Autumn, work thy witchery!

Strew the ground with poppy-seeds,
And let my bed be hung with weeds,
Growing gaunt and rank and tall,
Drooping o'er me like a pall.
Send thy stealthy, white-eyed mist
Across my brow to turn and twist
Fold on fold, and leave me blind
To all save visions in the mind.
Then, in the depth of rain-fed streams
I shall slumber, and in dreams
Slide through some long glen that burns
With a crust of blood-r...