If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being! If the breath
Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,
If even a soul like Milton's can know death;
O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,
Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes!
Surplus of Nature's dread activity,
Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,
Retreating slow, with meditative pause,
She formed with restless hands unconsciously.
Blank accident! nothing's anomaly!
If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state,
Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears,
The counter-weights! Thy laughter and thy tears
Mean but themselves, eac...

Ill fares the heart, when hope has fled;
    When vanishes each prospect fair,
When the last flickering ray has sped,
    And naught remains but mute despair;
When inky blackness doth enshroud
    The hopes the heart once held in store,
As some tall pine, by great winds bowed,
    Doth snap, and when the tempest's o'er,
Its noble form, magnificent and proud,
    Doth prostrate lie, nor ever riseth more;
    Thus breaks the heart, which sees no hope before.

Ill fares the heart, when hope has fled;
    That heart is as some ruin old,
With ancient arch and wall, o'erspread
    With moss, and desolating mold;
Whose banquet halls, where once the sound
    Of revelry rang unconfined,
Now, with the hoot of owls resound,
    Or echo back the mournful w...

I have experienc'd
The worst, the World can wreak on me, the worst
That can make Life indifferent, yet disturb
With whisper'd Discontents the dying prayer,
I have beheld the whole of all, wherein
My Heart had any interest in this Life,
To be disrent and torn from off my Hopes
That nothing now is left. Why then live on?
That Hostage, which the world had in it's keeping
Given by me as a Pledge that I would live,
That Hope of Her, say rather, that pure Faith
In her fix'd Love, which held me to keep truce
With the Tyranny of Life, is gone ah! whither?
What boots it to reply? 'tis gone! and now
Well may I break this Pact, this League of Blood
That ties me to myself, and break I shall!

Never enlivened with the liveliest ray
That fosters growth or checks or cheers decay,
Nor by the heaviest rain-drops more deprest,
This Flower, that first appeared as summer's guest,
Preserves her beauty 'mid autumnal leaves
And to her mournful habits fondly cleaves.
When files of stateliest plants have ceased to bloom,
One after one submitting to their doom,
When her coevals each and all are fled,
What keeps her thus reclined upon her lonesome bed?

The old mythologists, more impressed than we
Of this late day by character in tree
Or herb, that claimed peculiar sympathy,
Or by the silent lapse of fountain clear,
Or with the language of the viewless air
By bird or beast made vocal, sought a cause
To solve the mystery, not in Nature's laws
But in Man'...

This moment yearning and thoughtful, sitting alone,
It seems to me there are other men in other lands, yearning and thoughtful;
It seems to me I can look over and behold them, in Germany, Italy,
France, Spain or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or
India talking other dialects;
And it seems to me if I could know those men, I should become attached to them, as I do to men in my own lands;
O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
I know I should be happy with them.

"Is it safe to lie so lonely when the summer twilight closes
No companion maidens, only you asleep among the roses?

"Thirteen, fourteen years you number, and your hair is soft and scented,
Perilous is such a slumber in the twilight all untented.

"Lonely loveliness means danger, lying in your rose-leaf nest,
What if some young passing stranger broke into your careless rest?"

But she would not heed the warning, lay alone serene and slight,
Till the rosy spears of morning slew the darkness of the night.

Young love, walking softly, found her, in the scented, shady closes,
Threw his ardent arms around her, kissed her lips beneath the roses.

And she said, with smiles and blushes, "Would that I had sooner known!
Never now the morning thrushes wake and find me al...

O soul of life, 't is thee we long to hear,
Thine eyes we seek for, and thy touch we dream;
Lost from our days, thou art a spirit near, -
Life needs thine eloquence, and ways supreme.
More real than we who but a semblance wear,
We see thee not, because thou wilt not seem!

(Noel.)


By the sad fellowship of human suffering,
    By the bereavements that are thine and mine,
I venture--oh, forgive me!--with this offering,
    I would it were to thee God's oil and wine

I too have suffered--is it then surprising
    If to thy sacred grief I enter in?
My spirit draws near thine all sympathising,
    Sorrow, like love, "makes aliens near of kin."

Thou'rt weeping for thy gathered blossoms, mother,
    The Lord had need of him, and called him soon,
In morning freshness ere the dews of heaven
    Were chased before the burning rays of noon.

Thy darling child, like to God's summer blossom,
    Was very fair and pleasant to the sight,
The sunny head that rested on thy bosom,
    The loving eyes that were thy hear...

I' vo pensando, e nel pensier m' assale.

SELF-CONFLICT.


    Ceaseless I think, and in each wasting thought
So strong a pity for myself appears,
That often it has brought
My harass'd heart to new yet natural tears;
Seeing each day my end of life draw nigh,
Instant in prayer, I ask of God the wings
With which the spirit springs,
Freed from its mortal coil, to bliss on high;
But nothing, to this hour, prayer, tear, or sigh,
Whatever man could do, my hopes sustain:
And so indeed in justice should it be;
Able to stay, who went and fell, that he
Should prostrate, in his own despite, remain.
But, lo! the tender arms
In which I trust are open to me still,
Though fears my bosom fill
Of others' fate, and my own heart alarms,
Which...

Distance no grace can lend you, but for me
Distance yet magnifies your mystery.
With you, and soon content, I ask how should
In your two eyes be hid my heaven of good?
How should your own mere voice the strange words speak
That tease me with the sense of what's to seek
In all the world beside? How your brown hair,
That simply and neglectfully you wear,
Bind my wild thoughts in its abundant snare?
With you, I wonder how you're stranger than
Another woman to another man;
But parted--and you're as a ship unknown
That to poor castaways at dawn is shown
As strange as dawn, so strange they fear a trick
Of eyes long-vexed and hope with falseness sick.
Parted, and like the riddle of a dream,
Dark with rich promise, does your beauty seem.
I wonder at your patience...

The heart that once was rich with light,
And happy in your grace,
Now lieth cold beneath the scorn
That gathers on your face;
And every joy it knew before,
And every templed dream,
Is paler than the dying flash
On yonder mountain stream.
The soul, regretting foundered bliss
Amid the wreck of years,
Hath mourned it with intensity
Too deep for human tears!

The forest fadeth underneath
The blast that rushes by
The dripping leaves are white with death,
But Love will never die!
We both have seen the starry moss
That clings where Ruin reigns,
And one must know his lonely breast
Affection still retains;
Through all the sweetest hopes of life,
That clustered round and round,
Are lying now, like withered things,
Forsaken on the ...

    My heart is full of inarticulate pain,
        And beats laborious. Cold ungenial looks
    Invade my sanctuary. Men of gain,
        Wise in success, well-read in feeble books,
    No nigher come, I pray: your air is drear;
    'Tis winter and low skies when ye appear.

    Beloved, who love beauty and fair truth,
        Come nearer me; too near ye cannot come;
    Make me an atmosphere with your sweet youth;
        Give me your souls to breathe in, a large room;
    Speak not a word, for, see, my spirit lies
    Helpless and dumb; shine on me with your eyes.

    O all wide places, far from feverous towns;
        Great shining seas; pine forests; mountains wild;
    Rock-bosomed shores; rough heaths, and sheep-cropt downs;
        Vast pallid clo...

Fade off the ridges, rosy light,
Fade slowly from the last gray height,
And leave no gloomy cloud to grieve
The heart of this enchanted eve!

All things beneath the still sky seem
Bound by the spell of a sweet dream;
In the dusk forest, dreamingly,
Droops slowly down each plumèd head;
The river flowing softly by
Dreams of the sea; the quiet sea
Dreams of the unseen stars; and I
Am dreaming of the dreamless dead.

The river has a silken sheen,
But red rays of the sunset stain
Its pictures, from the steep shore caught,
Till shades of rock, and fern, and tree
Glow like the figures on a pane
Of some old church by twilight seen,
Or like the rich devices wrought
In mediaeval tapestry.

All lonely in a drifting boat
Through shi...

..."Una selva oscura." - Dante.


Awake or sleeping (for I know not which)
I was or was not mazed within a wood
Where every mother-bird brought up her brood
Safe in some leafy niche
Of oak or ash, of cypress or of beech,

Of silvery aspen trembling delicately,
Of plane or warmer-tinted sycamore,
Of elm that dies in secret from the core,
Of ivy weak and free,
Of pines, of all green lofty things that be.

Such birds they seemed as challenged each desire;
Like spots of azure heaven upon the wing,
Like downy emeralds that alight and sing,
Like actual coals on fire,
Like anything they seemed, and everything.

Such mirth they made, such warblings and such chat
With tongue of music in a well-tuned beak,
They seemed to speak more wis...

The long finger of blackness is holding its head for us.
Dingy bue is its shade,
comatose in movement, hazarding a slow swiftness,
it inches toward us.

Relief comes fitfully.
The dragon alone, an upstart
crowned with drunken spending,
has horse colours as ribbons with his eyes.
It cradles a breast of trembling bone.

Misercorde, Misercorde.
I dreamt I saw skeletal slackness
dangling;
the poverty of touch is a casket
with love in rumbling sockets.
Craziness is the passion of the engulfed,
dribbling pleasantly.

Presentations extended beyond and into themselves.
Slackness schemes with invalid awareness
in a brothel of hope.

"My life is drear; walking I labour sore;
    The heart in me is heavy as a stone;
And of my sorrows this the icy core:
    Life is so wide, and I am all alone!"

Thou did'st walk so, with heaven-born eyes down bent
    Upon the earth's gold-rosy, radiant clay,
That thou had'st seen no star in all God's tent
    Had not thy tears made pools first on the way.

Ah, little knowest thou the tender care
    In a love-plenteous cloak around thee thrown!
Full many a dim-seen, saving mountain-stair
    Toiling thou climb'st--but not one step alone!

Lift but thy languid head and see thy guide;
    Let thy steps go in his, nor choose thine own;
Then soon wilt thou, thine eyes with wonder wide,
    Cry, Now I know I never was alone!

Though bleak these woods and damp the ground
With fallen leaves so thickly strewn,
And cold the wind that wanders round
With wild and melancholy moan,

There is a friendly roof I know
Might shield me from the wintry blast;
There is a fire whose ruddy glow
Will cheer me for my wanderings past.

And so, though still where'er I roam
Cold stranger glances meet my eye,
Though when my spirit sinks in woe
Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh,

Though solitude endured too long
Bids youthful joys too soon decay,
Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue
And overclouds my noon of day,

When kindly thoughts that would have way
Flow back discouraged to my breast
I know there is, though far away
A home where heart and soul may rest.

War...

To bear a weight that cannot be borne,
Sisyphus, even you aren't that strong,
Although your heart cannot be torn
Time is short and Art is long.

Far from celebrated sepulchers
Toward a solitary graveyard
My heart, like a drum muffled hard
Beats a funeral march for the ill-starred.

Many jewels are buried or shrouded
In darkness and oblivion's clouds,
Far from any pick or drill bit,

Many a flower unburdens with regret
Its perfume sweet like a secret;
In profoundly empty solitude to sit.