Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head,—on mine, the dew,—
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
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Yes, call me by my pet-name ! let me hear
From innocent play, and leave the cowslips piled,To glance up in some face that proved me dearWith the look of its eyes. I miss the clearFond voices which, being drawn and reconciledInto the music of Heaven’s undefiled,Call me no longer. Silence on the bier,While I call God–call God !–So let thy mouthBe heir to those…
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
And ever since, it grew more clean and white,Slow to world-greetings, quick with its ‘Oh, list,’When the angels speak. A ring of amethystI could not wear here, plainer to my sight,Than that first kiss. The second passed in heightThe first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!That was…
How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways.
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal Grace.I love thee to the level of everyday’sMost quiet need, by sun and candle-light.I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.I love thee with the passion put to useIn my old…
I lived with visions for my company
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to knowA sweeter music than they played to me.But soon their trailing purple was not freeOf this world’s dust, their lutes did silent grow,And I myself grew faint and blind belowTheir vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come–to be,Belovèd, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,Their songs, their splendors (better,…
Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear
For we two look two ways, and cannot shineWith the same sunlight on our brow and hair.On me thou lookest with no doubting care,As on a bee in a crystalline;Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love’s divineAnd to spread wing and fly in the outer airWere most impossible failure, if I stroveTo fail so….
O Rose! who dares to name thee?
But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubble-wheat,—Kept seven years in a drawer—thy titles shame thee.The breeze that used to blow theeBetween the hedgerow thorns, and take awayAn odour up the lane to last all day,—If breathing now,—unsweetened would forego thee.The sun that used to smite thee,And mix his glory in thy gorgeous urn,Till beam…
L’avezza giovinetta pastorella
Va bagnando l’herbetta strana e bella
Che mal si spande a disusata spera
Fuor di sua natia alma primavera,
Cosi Amor meco insu la lingua snella
Desta il fior novo di strania favella,
Mentre io di te, vezzosamente altera,
Canto, dal mio buon popol non inteso
E’l bel Tamigi cangio col bel Arno
Amor lo volse, ed io a l’altrui peso
Seppi ch’ Amor cosa mai volse indarno.
Deh! foss’ il mio cuor lento e’l duro seno
A chi pianta dal ciel si buon terreno.
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Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench
Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws,Which others at their bar so often wrench,Today deep thoughts resolve with me to drenchIn mirth that after no repenting draws;Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause,And what the Swede intend, and what the French.To measure life learn thou betimes, and knowToward solid good what leads the nearest way;For…
Perplexed and troubled at his bad success
Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hopeSo oft, and the persuasive rhetoricThat sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,So little here, nay lost. But Eve was Eve;This far his over-match, who, self-deceivedAnd rash, beforehand had no better weighedThe strength he was to cope with, or his own.But—as a man who had been…
Quis multa gracilis te puer in Rosa
Latin Measure, as near as the Language permit.WHAT slender Youth bedew’d with liquid odoursCourts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,Pyrrha for whom bind’st thouIn wreaths thy golden Hair,Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall heOn Faith and changed Gods complain: and SeasRough with black winds and stormsUnwonted shall admire:Who now enjoyes thee credulous,…
I
Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King,Of wedded maid and Virgin Mother born,Our great redemption from above did bring;For so the holy sages once did sing,That he our deadly forfeit should release,And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.IIThat glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,Wherewith he wont at Heaven’s high…
XI
And wov’n close, both matter, form and stile;The Subject new: it walk’d the Town a while,Numbring good intellects; now seldom por’d on.Cries the stall-reader, bless us! what a word onA title page is this! and some in fileStand spelling fals, while one might walk to Mile-End Green. Why is it harder Sirs then Gordon,Colkitto, or…
I
Wherewith the stage of Air and Earth did ring,And joyous news of heavenly Infant’s birth,My muse with Angels did divide to sing;But headlong joy is ever on the wing,In wintry solstice like the shortened lightSoon swallowed up in dark and long outliving night.IIFor now to sorrow must I tune my song,And set my Harp to…
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or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
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When I cannot look at your face
Your feet of arched bone,your hard little feet.I know that they support you,and that your sweet weightrises upon them.Your waist and your breasts,the doubled purpleof your nipples,the sockets of your eyesthat have just flown away,your wide fruit mouth,your red tresses,my little tower.But I love your feetonly because they walkedupon the earth and uponthe wind and…
I do not love you except because I love you;
From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.I love you only because it’s you the one I love;I hate you deeply, and hating youBend to you, and the measure of my changing love for youIs that I do not see you but love you blindly.Maybe January light will consumeMy heart…
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
it came from, from winter or a river.I don’t know how or when,no they were not voices, they were notwords, nor silence,but from a street I was summoned,from the branches of night,abruptly from the others,among violent firesor returning alone,there I was without a faceand it touched me.I did not know what to say, my mouthhad…
Three triangles of birds crossed
In winter like a green beast.Everything just lay there, the silence,The unfolding gray, the heavy lightOf space, some land now and then.Over everything there was passingA flightAnd another flightOf dark birds, winter bodiesTrembling trianglesWhose wings,Frantically flapping, hardlyCan carry the gray cold, the desolate daysFrom one place to anotherAlong the coast of Chile.I am here while…
Love, a question
I have come back to youfrom thorny uncertainty.I want you straight asthe sword or the road.But you insiston keeping a nookof shadow that I do not want.My love,understand me,I love all of you,from eyes to feet, to toenails,inside,all the brightness, which you kept.It is I, my love,who knocks at your door.It is not the ghost,…
Here I love you.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.The snow unfurls in dancing figures.A silver gull slips down from the west.Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.Oh the black cross of a ship.Alone.Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.Far away the sea sounds and resounds.This…
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Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
But Thetis’ belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
From where pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
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I HAD this thought a while ago,
What I have done, or what would doIn this blind bitter land.’And I grew weary of the sunUntil my thoughts cleared up again,Remembering that the best I have doneWas done to make it plain;That every year I have cried, ‘At lengthMy darling understands it all,Because I have come into my strength,And words obey my call’;That…
I, THE poet William Yeats,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,Restored this tower for my wife George;And may these characters remainWhen all is ruin once again.
BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Edit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.All shuffle there; all cough in ink;All wear the carpet with their shoes;All think what other people think;All know the man their neighbour knows.Lord, what would they sayDid their Catullus walk that way?
I went out alone
My fancy on a man,And you know who.Another came in sightThat on a stick reliedTo hold himself upright;I sat and cried.And that was all my song –When everything is told,Saw I an old man youngOr young man old?
BLESSED be this place,
A bloody, arrogant powerRose out of the raceUttering, mastering it,Rose like these walls from theseStorm-beaten cottages —In mockery I have setA powerful emblem up,And sing it rhyme upon rhymeIn mockery of a timeHaIf dead at the top.Alexandria’s was a beacon tower, and Babylon’sAn image of the moving heavens, a log-book of thesun’s journey and the…
I – CRAZY JANE AND THE BISHOP
That I, midnight upon the stroke,(All find safety in the tomb.)May call down curses on his headBecause of my dear Jack that’s dead.Coxcomb was the least he said:The solid man and the coxcomb.Nor was he Bishop when his banBanished Jack the Journeyman,(All find safety in the tomb.)Nor so much as parish priest,Yet he, an old…
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Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
But Thetis’ belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
From where pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
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O HURRY where by water among the trees
When they have but looked upon their images —Would none had ever loved but you and I!Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoedPale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,When the sun looked out of his golden hood? —O that none ever loved but you and I!O hurty to the ragged wood, for thereI will drive all…
I BADE, because the wick and oil are spent
My discontented heart to draw contentFrom beauty that is cast out of a mouldIn bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,Appears, but when wc have gone is gone again,Being more indifferent to our solitudeThan ’twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;The living beauty is for younger men:We cannot pay its rribute of wild tears.
The old priest Peter Gilligan
For half his flock were in their bedsOr under green sods lay.Once, while he nodded in a chairAt the moth-hour of the eveAnother poor man sent for him,And he began to grieve.‘I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,For people die and die;And after cried he, ‘God forgive!My body spake not I!’He knelt, and leaning…
I RISE in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
And then I must scrub and bake and sweepTill stars are beginning to blink and peep;And the young lie long and dream in their bedOf the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,And their ~y goes over in idleness,And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:While I must work because I am old,And…
We should be hidden from their eyes,
And bodies broken like a thornWhereon the bleak north blows,To think of buried HectorAnd that none living knows.The women take so little stockIn what I do or sayThey’d sooner leave their cossetingTo hear a jackass bray;My arms are like the twisted thornAnd yet there beauty lay;The first of all the tribe lay thereAnd did such…
STRETCH towards the moonless midnight of the trees,
And they but famous old upholsteriesDelightful to the touch; tighten that handAs though to draw them closer yet.Rammed fullOf that most sensuous silence of the night(For since the horizon’s bought strange dogs are still)Climb to your chamber full of books and wait,No books upon the knee, and no one thereBut a Great Dane that cannot…