Meek Maid! that sitting on yon lofty tower,
View'st the calm floods that wildly beat below,
Be off! yon sunbeam veils a heavy shower,
Which sets my heart with joy a aching, oh!
For why, O maid, with locks of jetty flax,
Should grief convulse my heart with joyful knocks?
It is but reasonable you should ax,
Because it soundeth like a paradox.
Hear, then, bright virgin! if the rain comes down,
'Twill wet the roads, and spoil my morning ride;
But it will also spoil thy bran-new gown,
And therefore cure thee of thy cursed pride.
Moral this sonnet, if well understood,
Shows the same thing may bring both harm and good.

Strophe I

My two-fold Book! single in show
    But double in Contents,
Neat, but not curiously adorn'd
    Which in his early youth,
A poet gave, no lofty one in truth
Although an earnest wooer of the Muse--
Say, while in cool Ausonian[2] shades
    Or British wilds he roam'd,
Striking by turns his native lyre,
    By turns the Daunian lute
    And stepp'd almost in air,--

Antistrophe

Say, little book, what furtive hand
Thee from thy fellow books convey'd,
What time, at the repeated suit
        Of my most learned Friend,
I sent thee forth an honour'd traveller
From our great city to the source of Thames,
                    Caerulean sire!
Where rise the fountains and the raptures ring,
        Of the Aoni...

Sweet resting place! that long hath been
A boon Elysian 'mid the din
    Of city life, 'mid city smoke;
Where weary ones who toil and spin
Have turned aside as to an inn
    Whose swinging sign a welcome spoke;
Where misanthropes find medicine
In peals of laughter that begin
    With ancient, resurrected joke,
Or ready wit of harlequin;
Where children, free from discipline,
    Take on Diversion's easy yoke.

Fair oasis! to view aright
Its charming paths, its sloping height,
    Its beautiful and broad expanse,
Must one approach in witching night
When, like abodes of airy sprite
    Revealed unto the wondering glance,
O'erflooded with electric light
Than Luna's beams more dazzling bright,
    Illumined nooks the scene enhance;
Whi...

To kneel before some saintly shrine,
To breathe the health of airs divine,
Or bathe where sacred rivers flow,
The cowled and turbaned pilgrims go.
I too, a palmer, take, as they
With staff and scallop-shell, my way
To feel, from burdening cares and ills,
The strong uplifting of the hills.

The years are many since, at first,
For dreamed-of wonders all athirst,
I saw on Winnipesaukee fall
The shadow of the mountain wall.
Ah! where are they who sailed with me
The beautiful island-studded sea?
And am I he whose keen surprise
Flashed out from such unclouded eyes?

Still, when the sun of summer burns,
My longing for the hills returns;
And northward, leaving at my back
The warm vale of the Merrimac,
I go to meet the winds of morn,
...

O, tomb of the past
Where buried hopes lie,
In my visions I see
Thy phantoms pass by!
A form, long departed,
    Before me appears;
A sweet voice, long silent,
    Again greets my ears.

Fond memory dwells
    On the things that have been;
And my eyes calmly gaze
    On a long vanished scene;
A scene such as memory
    Stores deep in the breast,
Which only appears
    In a season of rest.

Once more we wander,
    Her fair hand in mine;
Once more her promise,
    "I'll ever be thine";
Once more the parting,
    The shroud, and the pall,
The sods' hollow thump
    As they coffinward fall.

The reverie ends--
    All the fancies have flown;
And my sad, lonely heart,
    Now seems doubly alone;...

But as Thou earnest forth to bring the Poor,
Whose hearts were nearer faith and verity,
Spiritual childhood, thy philosophy,--
So taught'st the A, B, C of heavenly lore;
Because Thou sat'st not, lonely evermore,
With mighty thoughts informing language high;
But, walking in thy poem continually,
Didst utter acts, of all true forms the core;
Instead of parchment, writing on the soul
High thoughts and aspirations, being so
Thine own ideal; Poet and Poem, lo!
One indivisible; Thou didst reach thy goal
Triumphant, but with little of acclaim,
Even from thine own, escaping not their blame.

There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not,
On the desolate flats where gaunt appletrees rot.
Where the brooding old ridge rises up to the breeze
From his dark lonely gullies of stringy-bark trees,
There are voice-haunted gaps, ever sullen and strange,
But Eurunderee lies like a gem in the range.

Still I see in my fancy the dark-green and blue
Of the box-covered hills where the five-corners grew;
And the rugged old sheoaks that sighed in the bend
O'er the lily-decked pools where the dark ridges end,
And the scrub-covered spurs running down from the Peak
To the deep grassy banks of Eurunderee Creek.

On the knolls where the vineyards and fruit-gardens are
There's a beauty that even the drought cannot mar;
For I noticed it oft, in the days that are lo...

        Why do we pity those who weep? The pain
    That finds a ready outlet in the flow
    Of salt and bitter tears is blessed woe,
        And does not need our sympathies. The rain
        But fits the shorn field for new yield of grain;
    While the red, brazen skies, the sun's fierce glow,
    The dry, hot winds that from the tropics blow
        Do parch and wither the unsheltered plain.
        The anguish that through long, remorseless years
    Looks out upon the world with no relief
        Of sudden tempests or slow-dripping tears -
    The still, unuttered, silent, wordless grief
        That evermore doth ache, and ache, and ache -
        This is the sorrow wherewith hearts do break.

We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.

The snow lies deep, ice-fringes hem the thatch;
I knock my shoes, my Love lifts me the latch,
Shows me her eyes--O frozen stars, they shine
Kindly! I clasp her. Quick! her lips are mine.

When the boughs of the garden hang heavy with rain
And the blackbird reneweth his song,
And the thunder departing yet rolleth again,
I remember the ending of wrong.

When the day that was dusk while his death was aloof
Is ending wide-gleaming and strange
For the clearness of all things beneath the world's roof,
I call back the wild chance and the change.

For once we twain sat through the hot afternoon
While the rain held aloof for a while,
Till she, the soft-clad, for the glory of June
Changed all with the change of her smile.

For her smile was of longing, no longer of glee,
And her fingers, entwined with mine own,
With caresses unquiet sought kindness of me
For the gift that I never had known.

Then down rushed the rain, and the voice of...

Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.

The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.

The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.

Two brown ponies trotting slowly
Stopped at a dim-lit trough to drink:
The dark van drummed down the distance slowly;
While the city stars so dim...

Down Wessex way, when spring's a-shine,
The blackbird's "pret-ty de-urr!"
In Wessex accents marked as mine
Is heard afar and near.

He flutes it strong, as if in song
No R's of feebler tone
Than his appear in "pretty dear,"
Have blackbirds ever known.

Yet they pipe "prattie deerh!" I glean,
Beneath a Scottish sky,
And "pehty de-aw!" amid the treen
Of Middlesex or nigh.

While some folk say - perhaps in play -
Who know the Irish isle,
'Tis "purrity dare!" in treeland there
When songsters would beguile.

Well: I'll say what the listening birds
Say, hearing "pret-ty de-urr!" -
However strangers sound such words,
That's how we sound them here.

Yes, in this clime at pairing time,
As soon as eyes can see her
A...

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Here's never a bough to be tossed in the breeze,
For it’s long since the forest was green;
And round all the trunks of the naked white trees
The marks of the death-ring are seen.
The solemn-faced bear, who had looked on the blacks
From his home with the ’possum and cat,
Blinked anxiously down when the death-dealing axe
Was ring-barking Skeleton Flat.

And, strange to be seen in the evergreen south,
The gums for ten summers have stood,
And dried in the terrible furnace of drouth,
Till harder than flint is the wood.
Now tall grows the grass at the roots of the trees,
But a beautiful forest it cost;
And the heart of the splitter is sad when he sees
And thinks of the timber that’s lost.

Here flies, through a sky that is glazed, the black crow,
And ...

I.

When the poppies, with their shields,
Sentinel
Forest and the harvest fields,
In the bell
Of a blossom, fair to see,
There I stall the bumble-bee,
My good stud;
There I stable him and hold,
Harness him with hairy gold;
There I ease his burly back
Of the honey and its sack
Gathered from each bud.

II.

Where the glow-worm lights its lamp,
There I lie;
Where, above the grasses damp,
Moths go by;
Now within the fussy brook,
Where the waters wind and crook
Round the rocks,
I go sailing down the gloom
Straddling on a wisp of broom;
Or, beneath the owlet moon,
Trip it to the cricket's tune
Tossing back my locks.

III.

Ere the crowfoot on the lawn
Lifts its head,
Or the glo...

Dust to dust:
Fall and perish love and lust:
Life is one brief autumn day;
Sin and sorrow haunt the way
To the narrow house of clay,
Clutching at the good and just:
Dust to dust.

Dust to dust:
Still we strive and toil and trust,
From the cradle to the grave:
Vainly crying, "Jesus, save!"
Fall the coward and the brave,
Fall the felon and the just:
Dust to dust.

Dust to dust:
Hark, I hear the wintry gust;
Yet the roses bloom to-day,
Blushing to the kiss of May,
While the north winds sigh and say:
"Lo we bring the cruel frost
Dust to dust."

Dust to dust:
Yet we live and love and trust,
Lifting burning brow and eye
To the mountain peaks on high:
From the peaks the ages cry,
Strewing ashes, rime an...

Why should I weary you, dear heart, with words,
Words all discordant with a foolish pain?
Thoughts cannot interrupt or prayers do wrong,
And soft and silent as the summer rain
Mine fall upon your pathway all day long.

Giving as God gives, counting not the cost
Of broken box or spilled and fragrant oil,
I know that, spite of your strong carelessness,
Rest must be sweeter, worthier must be toil,
Touched with such mute, invisible caress.

One of these days, our weary ways quite trod,
Made free at last and unafraid of men,
I shall draw near and reach to you my hand.
And you? Ah! well, we shall be spirits then,
I think you will be glad and understand.