SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
I lift the Lord on high,
Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see
The small birds of the forest lingering by
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred
What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad…
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
I
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,
And gaze upon her smile;
Seem as you drank the very air
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you’ve taken to supply,
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple…
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling…
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens,…
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
How great unto the living seem the dead!
How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;
How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread
