Thou doest expectant Nature wrong,Delaying long, delay no more.What stays thee from the clouded noons,Thy sweetness from its proper place?Can trouble live with April days,Or sadness in the summer moons?Bring orchis, bring the fox-glove spire,The little speedwell’s darling blue,Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew,Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.O thou, new-year, delaying long,Delayest the sorrow in my…
Up to the people: thither flocked at noonHis tenants, wife and child, and thither halfThe neighbouring borough with their InstituteOf which he was the patron. I was thereFrom college, visiting the son,–the sonA Walter too,–with others of our set,Five others: we were seven at Vivian-place.And me that morning Walter showed the house,Greek, set with busts:…
With fruitful cloud and living smoke,Dark yew, that graspest at the stonesAnd dippest toward the dreamless head,To thee too comes the golden hourWhen flower is feeling after flower;But Sorrow–fixt upon the dead,And darkening the dark graves of men,–What whisper’d from her lying lips?Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,And passes into gloom again.
But he forgets the days beforeGod shut the doorways of his head.The days have vanish’d, tone and tint,And yet perhaps the hoarding senseGives out at times (he knows not whence)A little flash, a mystic hint;And in the long harmonious years(If Death so taste Lethean springs),May some dim touch of earthly thingsSurprise thee ranging with thy…
We live within the stranger’s land,And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.Our father’s dust is left aloneAnd silent under other snows:There in due time the woodbine blows,The violet comes, but we are gone.No more shall wayward grief abuseThe genial hour with mask and mime;For change of place, like growth of time,Has broke the bond of dying use.Let…
The linnet born within the cage,That never knew the summer woods:I envy not the beast that takesHis license in the field of time,Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,To whom a conscience never wakes;Nor, what may count itself as blest,The heart that never plighted trothBut stagnates in the weeds of sloth;Nor any want-begotten rest.I hold it…
For words, like Nature, half revealAnd half conceal the Soul within.But, for the unquiet heart and brain,A use in measured language lies;The sad mechanic exercise,Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,Like coarsest clothes against the cold;But that large grief which these enfoldIs given in outline and no more.
Whose spirits falter in the mist,And languish for the purple seas.It is the land that freemen till,That sober-suited Freedom chose,The land, where girt with friends or foesA man may speak the thing he will;A land of settled government,A land of just and old renown,Where Freedom slowly broadens downFrom precedent to precedent:Where faction seldom gathers head,But…
Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,A broken chancel with a broken cross,That stood on a dark strait of barren land.On one…
High in her chamber up a tower to the eastGuarded the sacred shield of Lancelot;Which first she placed where the morning’s earliest rayMight strike it, and awake her with the gleam;Then fearing rust or soilure fashioned for itA case of silk, and braided thereuponAll the devices blazoned on the shieldIn their own tinct, and added,…
