The whispering water rocks the reeds,
And, murmuring softly, laps the weeds;
And nurses there the falsest bloom
That ever wrought a lover's doom.
Forget me not! Forget me not!
Ah! would I could forget!
But, crying still, "Forget me not,"
Her image haunts me yet.

We wander'd by the river's brim,
The day grew dusk, the pathway dim;
Her eyes like stars dispell'd the gloom,
Her gleaming fingers pluck'd the bloom.
Forget me not! Forget me not!
Ah! would I could forget!
But, crying still, "Forget me not,"
Her image haunts me yet.

The pale moon lit her paler face,
And coldly watch'd our last embrace,
And chill'd her tresses' sunny hue,
And stole that flower's turquoise blue.
Forget me not! Forget me not!
Ah! would I could forget!<...

This heart that flutters near my heart
My hope and all my riches is,
Unhappy when we draw apart
And happy between kiss and kiss:
My hope and all my riches, yes!
And all my happiness.

For there, as in some mossy nest
The wrens will divers treasures keep,
I laid those treasures I possessed
Ere that mine eyes had learned to weep.
Shall we not be as wise as they
Though love live but a day?

I.

All’s over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark, ’tis the sparrows’ good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!

II.

And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that, to-day;
One day more bursts them open fully
You know the red turns grey.

III.

To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we, well, friends the merest
Keep much that I resign:

IV.

For each glance of the eye so bright and black,
Though I keep with heart’s endeavour,
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my soul for ever!

V.

Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold ...

"Hign bliss is only for a higher state,"
But, surely, if severe afflictions borne
With patience merit the reward of peace,
Peace ye deserve; and may the solid good,
Sought by a wise though late exchange, and here
With bounteous hand beneath a cottage-roof
To you accorded, never be withdrawn,
Nor for the world's best promises renounced.
Most soothing was it for a welcome Friend,
Fresh from the crowded city, to behold
That lonely union, privacy so deep,
Such calm employments, such entire content.
So when the rain is over, the storm laid,
A pair of herons oft-times have I seen,
Upon a rocky islet, side by side,
Drying their feathers in the sun, at ease;
And so, when night with grateful gloom had fallen,
Two glow-worms in such nearness that they shared,
...

1.

In one who felt as once he felt,
This might, perhaps, have fann'd the flame;
But now his heart no more will melt,
Because that heart is not the same.


2.

As when the ebbing flames are low,
The aid which once improved their light,
And bade them burn with fiercer glow,
Now quenches all their blaze in night.


3.

Thus has it been with Passion's fires -
As many a boy and girl remembers -
While every hope of love expires,
Extinguish'd with the dying embers.


4.

The first, though not a spark survive,
Some careful hand may teach to burn;
The last, alas! can ne'er survive;
No touch can bid its warmth return.


5.

Or, if it chance to wake again,
Not always doom'd it...

Letter IV. Yearnings.


I.

    The earth is glad, I know, when night is spent,
    For then she wakes the birdlings in the bowers;
    And, one by one, the rosy-footed hours
    Start for the race; and from his crimson tent
    The soldier-sun looks o'er the firmament;
    And all his path is strewn with festal flowers.


II.

    But what his mission? What the happy quest
    Of all this toil? He journeys on his way
    As Cæsar did, unbiass'd by the sway
    Of maid or man. His goal is in the west.
    Will he unbuckle there, a...

O'er hill, and dale, and distant sea,
Through all the miles that stretch between,
My thought must fly to rest on thee,
And would, though worlds should intervene.

Nay, thou art now so dear, methinks
The farther we are forced apart,
Affection's firm elastic links
But bind the closer round the heart.

For now we sever each from each,
I learned what I have lost in thee;
Alas, that nothing else could teach
How great indeed my love should be!

Farewell! I did not know thy worth;
But thou art gone, and now 'tis prized:
So angels walk'd unknown on earth,
But when they flew were recognized!

Yes, sad one of Sion,[1] if closely resembling,
    In shame and in sorrow, thy withered-up heart--
If drinking deep, deep, of the same "cup of trembling"
    Could make us thy children, our parent thou art,

Like thee doth our nation lie conquered and broken,
    And fallen from her head is the once royal crown;
In her streets, in her halls, Desolation hath spoken,
    And "while it is day yet, her sun hath gone down."[2]

Like thine doth her exile, mid dreams of returning,
    Die far from the home it were life to behold;
Like thine do her sons, in the day of their mourning,
    Remember the bright things that blest them of old.

Ah, well may we call her, like thee "the Forsaken,"[3]
    Her boldest are vanquished, her proude...

"It is not death that harrows us," they lipped,
"The soundless cell is in itself relief,
For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped
At unawares, and at its best but brief."

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone,
Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye,
As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone
From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead,
They should not, like the many, be at rest,
But stray as apparitions; hence I said,
"Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

"We are among the few death sets not free,
The hurt, misrepresented names, who come
At each year's brink, and cry to History
To do them justice, or go past them dumb.

"We are stript of rights; our shames...

You love me, you say, and I think you do,
But I know so many who don’t,
And how can I say I’ll be true to you
When I know very well that I won’t?

I have journeyed long and my goal is far,
I love, but I cannot bide,
For as sure as rises the morning star,
With the break of day I’ll ride.

I was doomed to ruin or doomed to mar
The home wherever I stay,
But I’ll think of you as the morning star
And they call me Break o’ Day.

They well might have named me the Fall o’ Night,
For drear is the track I mark,
But I love fair girls and I love the light,
For I and my tribe were dark.

You may love me dear, for a day and night,
You may cast your life aside;
But as sure as the morning star shines bright
With the break of day I’ll ride.

It is not blasphemy to hope that Heaven
More perfectly will give those nameless joys
Which throb within the pulses of the blood
And sweeten all that bitterness which Earth
Infuses in the heaven-born soul. O thou
Whose dear love gleamed upon the gloomy path
Which this lone spirit travelled, drear and cold,
Yet swiftly leading to those awful limits
Which mark the bounds of Time and of the space
When Time shall be no more; wilt thou not turn
Those spirit-beaming eyes and look on me,
Until I be assured that Earth is Heaven,
And Heaven is Earth? - will not thy glowing cheek,
Glowing with soft suffusion, rest on mine,
And breathe magnetic sweetness through the frame
Of my corporeal nature, through the soul
Now knit with these fine fibres? I would give
The longe...

Up from the spirit-depths ringing,
        Softly your melody swells,
Sweet as a seraphim's singing,
        Tender-toned memory-bells!
                The laughter of childhood,
                The song of the wildwood,
The tinkle of streams through the echoing dell,
                The voice of a mother,
                The shout of a brother.
Up from life's morning melodiously swell.

Up from the spirit-depths ringing
        Richly your melody swells,
Sweet reminiscences bringing,
        Joyous-toned memory-bells! -
                Youth's beautiful bowers,
                Her dew-spangled flowers,
The pictures which Hope of futurity drew, -
                Love's rapturous vision
                Of regions Elysian,
In glowing perspect...

My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.

O Time! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on Sorrow's wound, and slowly thence
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest unperceived away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile:
As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, though its wings are wet the while:
Yet ah! how much must that poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!

Little head against my shoulder,
Shy at first, then somewhat bolder,
And up-eyed;
Till she, with a timid quaver,
Yielded to the kiss I gave her;
But, she sighed.

That there mingled with her feeling
Some sad thought she was concealing
It implied.
- Not that she had ceased to love me,
None on earth she set above me;
But she sighed.

She could not disguise a passion,
Dread, or doubt, in weakest fashion
If she tried:
Nothing seemed to hold us sundered,
Hearts were victors; so I wondered
Why she sighed.

Afterwards I knew her throughly,
And she loved me staunchly, truly,
Till she died;
But she never made confession
Why, at that first sweet concession,
She had sighed.

It was in our May, remember;
And...

        Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws,
        and bags of blood let out their flies.. .
                    ? Dylan Thomas

    The land is barren
    wears straw wisps
    as an unkempt man
    might razor stubble.

    The land is dry, a faded yellow
    in its barrenness.
    A sky broods from afar,
    a stalactite sun accounts merely a jot
    above that thin road into despair.

    Grass lies everywhere dead,
    faded tongues above an
    earth afflicted with scleroderma,
    deadliest of skin disturbances,
    forerunner of deeper pestilence.

    An erasing wind whips the fields
    further into bereavement;
    turns tiny bits of chaff to pursue themselves
    in a mad St. Vitus dance
    of cold...

She looked at her neighbour's house in the light of the waning day -
A shower of rice on the steps, and the shreds of a bride's bouquet.
And then she drew the shade, to shut out the growing gloom,
But she shut it into her heart instead.    (Was that a voice in the room?)

'My neighbour is sad,' she sighed, 'like the mother bird who sees
The last of her brood fly out of the nest to make its home in the trees' -
And then in a passion of tears - 'But, oh, to be sad like her:
Sad for a joy that has come and gone!'    (Did some one speak, or stir?)

She looked at her faded hands, all burdened with costly rings;
She looked on her widowed home, all burdened with priceless things.
She thought of the dead years gone, of the empty years ahead -
(Yes, something stirred and something sp...

How could I know, how could I guess
That here was your great happiness--
In mine? And how could I know
Your love infinite must grow?

Suddenly at dawn I wake
To see the cruse of colour break
Over the East, and then the gray
Creep up with light of common day ...
No, no, no! again that bright
Flashing, flushing, flooding light
Leading on day, until I ache
With love to see the dark world wake.

O, with such second flood your love
Painted my earth and heaven above,
With such wild magnificence
As bruised my heart in every sense,
In every nerve. Was ever man
Fit this renewed love to sustain?

Now in these days when Autumn's leaf
Is red and gold, and for a brief
Day the earth flowers ere it dies,
What if Spring came with new su...