PEOPLE'S CHOICE
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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,
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
The sun goes down, and over all
These barren reaches by the tide
Such unelusive glories fall,
Lord of my heart’s elation,
Spirit of things unseen,
Be thou my aspiration
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands
What is he buzzing in my ears?
“Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
