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Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad…
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
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,
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
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
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,
Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,
Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
The lords of life, the lords of life, —
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
“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,
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes —
Lord of my heart’s elation,
Spirit of things unseen,
Be thou my aspiration
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night
And she made all of light,
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
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored my earth to joy
Have you departed, every one,
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? say?”
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
