He sings.
I send my heart up to thee, all my heart
In this my singing.
For the stars help me, and the sea bears part;
The very night is clinging
Closer to Venice’ streets to leave one space
Above me, whence thy face
May light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place.

She speaks.
Say after me, and try to say
My very words, as if each word
Came from you of your own accord,
In your own voice, in your own way:
“This woman’s heart and soul and brain
“Are mine as much as this gold chain
“She bids me wear; which” (say again)
“I choose to make by cherishing
“A precious thing, or choose to fling
“Over the boat-side, ring by ring.”
And yet once more say . . . no word more!
Since words are only words. Give o’er!
Unless you c...

It is not over yet-the fight
    Where those immortal dreamers failed.
They stormed the citadels of night
    And the night praised them--and prevailed.
So long ago the cause was lost
    We scarce distinguish friend from foe;
But--if the dead can help it most--
    The armies of the dead will grow.

The world has all our banners now,
    And filched our watchwords for its own.
The world has crowned the "rebel's" brow
    And millions crowd his lordly throne.
The masks have altered. Names are names;
    They praise the "truth" that is not true.
The "rebel" that the world acclaims
    Is not the rebel Shelley knew.

We may not build that Commonweal.
    We may not reach the goal we set.
But there's a flag they dare not steal.
    Forwar...

[Midnight.]

First, two white arms that held him very close,
And ever closer as he drew him back
Reluctantly, the loose gold-colored hair
A thousand delicate fibres reaching out
Still to detain him; then some twenty steps
Of iron staircase winding round and down,
And ending in a narrow gallery hung
With Gobelin tapestries--Andromeda
Rescued by Perseus, and the sleek Diana
With her nymphs bathing; at the farther end
A door that gave upon a starlit grove
Of citron and clipt palm-trees; then a path
As bleached as moonlight, with the shadow of leaves
Stamped black upon it; next a vine-clad length
Of solid masonry; and last of all
A Gothic archway packed with night, and then--
A sudden gleaming dagger through his heart.

The locust builds its are of sound
And tops it with a spire;
The roadside leaves pant to the ground
With dust from hoof and tire.

The insects, day and night, make din,
And with the heat grow shriller;
And everywhere great spiders spin,
And crawls the caterpillar.

The wells are dry; the creeks are pools;
Weeds cram their beds with bristles;
And when a wind breathes, naught it cools,
The air grows white with thistles.

For months the drouth has burned and baked
The wood and field and garden;
The flower-plots are dead; and, raked,
Or mown, the meadows harden.

The Summer, sunk in godlessness,
From quarter unto quarter,
Now drags, now lifts a dusty dress,
That shows a sloven garter.

The child of Spring, it now appear...

When spring, to woods and wastes around,
Brought bloom and joy again,
The murdered traveller's bones were found,
Far down a narrow glen.

The fragrant birch, above him, hung
Her tassels in the sky;
And many a vernal blossom sprung,
And nodded careless by.

The red-bird warbled, as he wrought
His hanging nest o'erhead,
And fearless, near the fatal spot,
Her young the partridge led.

But there was weeping far away,
And gentle eyes, for him,
With watching many an anxious day,
Were sorrowful and dim.

They little knew, who loved him so,
The fearful death he met,
When shouting o'er the desert snow,
Unarmed, and hard beset;

Nor how, when round the frosty pole
The northern dawn was red,
The mountain wolf and wil...

It was the Angel Azrael the Lord God sent below
At midnight, into every house in Egypt, long ago -
0 long, and long ago.


All day the wife of Pharaoh had paced the palace hall
Or the long white pillared court that was open to the sky;
A passion of wild restlessness ensnared her in its thrall
While she fought a fear within her - a thing that would not die.

She had sent away her maidens - their weeping vexed her ears -
Their pallid faces filled her with impatient pitying scorn; -
But she kept one time-worn woman, who long had outgrown fears,
The old brown nurse who held her son the day that he was born.

The mighty gods had failed her - the river-gods and the sun,
And the little gods of brass and stone - who stared but made no sign,
So she pled with them ...

Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery - O Misery,
This world is all too wide for thee.

We chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were speaking of,
A front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at arm's length
Or put the leaves aside that framed it in.
"Pretty," he said. "Come in. No one will care."
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. "You see," he said,
"Everything's as she left it when she died.
Her sons won't sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and summer here
Where they were boy...

She hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.

The great men framed the fierce decrees
Embroiling State with State;
They bit their thumbs across the seas
In diplomatic hate;
They lit the pyre whose glare and heat
Make Hell itself seem cold;
The flames bloomed red above the wheat,
Their wild profusion wreathed the street,
Then in the smoke and fiery sleet
The common men took hold.

Where Babel was with Bedlam freed,
And wide the gates were flung;
To chaos, while the anarch breed
In all the world gave tongue,
The common men in close array,
By mountain, plain and sea,
Went outward girded for the fray,
On one dear quest, whate'er they pay
In blood and pain, the open way
To keep for Liberty.

The common men who never tire,
Unsightly in the mirk
Of caking blood and smoke a...

I sit by the fire in the gloaming,
    In the depths of my easy chair,
And I ponder, as old men ponder,
    Over times and things that were.

And outside is the gusty rushing,
    Of the fierce November blast,
With the snow drift waltzing and whirling,
    And eddying swiftly past,

It's a wild night to be abroad in,
    When the ice blast and snow drift meet
To wreath round all the world of winter
    A shroud and a winding sheet.

There's a dash of hail at the window,
    Thick with driving snow is the air;
But I sit here in ease and comfort
    In the depths of my easy chair.

I have fought my way in life's battle,
    And won Fortune's fickle caress;
Won from fame just a passing notice,
    And enjoy what is called succes...

The story of the following ballad was related to me, when a school boy, as a fact which had really happened in the North of England. I have adopted the metre of Mr. Lewis's Alonzo and Imogene--a poem deservedly popular.


MARY.

I.

Who is she, the poor Maniac, whose wildly-fix'd eyes
    Seem a heart overcharged to express?
She weeps not, yet often and deeply she sighs,
She never complains, but her silence implies
    The composure of settled distress.


II.

No aid, no compassion the Maniac will seek,
    Cold and hunger awake not her care:
Thro' her rags do the winds of the winter blow bleak
On her poor withered bosom half bare, and her cheek
    Has the deathy pale hue of despair.


III.

Yet chearful and happy,...

The Lady Mary Villiers lies
Under this stone; with weeping eyes
The parents that first gave her birth,
And their sad friends, laid her in earth.
If any of them, Reader, were
Known unto thee, shed a tear;
Or if thyself possess a gem
As dear to thee, as this to them,
Though a stranger to this place,
Bewail in theirs thine own hard case:
For thou perhaps at thy return
May’st find thy Darling in an urn.

From The Greek Of Moschus.

[Published from the Hunt manuscripts by Forman, "Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1876.]

Ye Dorian woods and waves, lament aloud,
Augment your tide, O streams, with fruitless tears,
For the beloved Bion is no more.
Let every tender herb and plant and flower,
From each dejected bud and drooping bloom,
Shed dews of liquid sorrow, and with breath
Of melancholy sweetness on the wind
Diffuse its languid love; let roses blush,
Anemones grow paler for the loss
Their dells have known; and thou, O hyacinth,
Utter thy legend now, yet more, dumb flower,
Than 'Ah! alas!' thine is no common grief
Bion the [sweetest singer] is no more.

In one whole world is but one Phoenix found,
A Phoenix thou, this Phoenix then alone:
By thy rare plume thy kind is easly knowne,
With heauenly colours dide, with natures wonder cround.
Heape thine own vertues, seasoned by their sunne,
On heauenly top of thy diuine desire;
Then with thy beautie set the same on fire,
So by thy death thy life shall be begunne.
Thy selfe, thus burned in this sacred flame,
With thine owne sweetnes al the heauens perfuming,
And stil increasing as thou art consuming,
Shalt spring againe from th' ashes of thy fame;
    And mounting vp shall to the heauens ascend:
    So maist thou liue, past world, past fame, past end.

So when the verdure of his life was shed,
With all the grace of ripened manlihead,
And on his locks, but now so lovable,
Old age like desolating winter fell,
Leaving them white and flowerless and forlorn:
Then from his bed the Goddess of the Morn
Softly withheld, yet cherished him no less
With pious works of pitying tenderness;
Till when at length with vacant, heedless eyes,
And hoary height bent down none otherwise
Than burdened willows bend beneath their weight
Of snow when winter winds turn temperate, -
So bowed with years - when still he lingered on:
Then to the daughter of Hyperion
This counsel seemed the best: for she, afar
By dove-gray seas under the morning star,
Where, on the wide world's uttermost extremes,
Her amber-walled, auroral palace gleam...

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar,
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world, here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat,
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth,
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!'

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
    Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
    Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies,
    Hushed in and curtained with a blessèd dearth
    Of all that irked her from the hour of birth;
With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noon-day holdeth her,
    Silence more musical than any song;
Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
    And when she wakes she will not think it long.