Hovers ‘twixt vague pleasure
And tremulous confidence.
Arms to have and to use them
And a soul to be made
Worthy, if not worthy;
If afraid, unafraid.
To endure for a little,
To endure and have done:
Men I love about me,
Over me the sun!
And should at last suddenly
Fly the speeding death,
The four great quarters of heaven
Receive this littlle breath.
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Put by the sun my joyful soul,
Put by the wine, now for long yearsWe must be thirsty with salt tears;Put by the rose, bind thou insteadThe fiercest thorns about thy head;Put by the courteous tire, we needBut the poor pilgrim’s blackest weed;Put by — a’beit with tears — thy lute,Sing but to God or else be mute.Take leave of friends save…
The Sprig Of Lime
He lay, and those who watched him were amazedTo see unheralded beneath the lidsTwin tears, new-gathered at the price of pain,Start and at once run crookedly athwartCheeks channelled long by pain, never by tears.So desolate too the sigh next utteredThey had wept also, but his great lips moved,And bending down one heard, ‘A sprig of…
Never am I so alone
Blurred masks of stern or grinning stone,Unmeaning eyes and voices loud.Gaze dares not encounter gaze,…Humbled, I turn my head aside;When suddenly there is a face…Pale, subdued and grievous-eyed.Ah, I know that visage meek,Those trembling lips, the eyes that shineBut turn from that which they would seekWith an air piteous, divine!There is not a line or…
Exquisite stillness! What serenities
The stonecrop’s fire and beyond the precipiceHow huge, how hushed the primrose evenfall!How softly, too, the white crane voyagesYon honeyed height of warmth and silence,whenceHe can look down on islet, lake and shoreAnd crowding woods and voiceless promontoriesOr, further gazing, view the magnificenceOf cloud- like mountains and of mountainous cloudOr ghostly wrack below the horizon…
Evenstar, still evenstar
On a more unhappy head,On tears lonelier than mine,Vainer prayers and deepest sighs,Take, sweet spirit, thou that artComforter of our despairsAll the prayers perforce unsaid,All the sighs I cannot sigh,All the tears I cannot shed;Fill his eyes and flood his heart,Who, my everlasting kin,Broods, afar, unknown, apart.Bring, ah bring him that surceaseFrom unsolaceable pain,Which nor…
It was deep night, and over Jerusalem’s low roofs
The moonlight crept and glistened silent, solemn, sweet,Over dome and column, up empty, endless street;In the closed, scented gardens the rose loosed from the stemHer white showery petals; none regarded them;The starry thicket breathed odours to the sentinel palm;Silence possessed the city like a soul possessed by calm.Not a spark in the warren under the…