SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
Constantly risking absurdity
…
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
I.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall?
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”
“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
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!
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
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
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you’ve taken to supply,
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
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
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
