SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
You charm’d me not with that fair face
Though it was all divine:
To be another’s is the grace,
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
I
some towers are made of cladding
some made of ivory
some burn in the night
some built by slaves
wind rushes through coarse hair
Dem did sey she pregnance
Cum a sea full a mi
Weighing har down eena har shoe dem
Dresses, coco, mangoes an baggy an arl
Dem did sey de ship nearly sink
Mi mumma nebah sleep a wink
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, an any boy of love
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
I can manage being alone,
can pace out convivial hope
across my managing ground.
Someone might call, later.
What do the dead make of us
that we’d flay ourselves trying
It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
Tune: Rory Dall’s Port
First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; …
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
A thousand martyrs I have made,
All sacrific’d to my desire;
A thousand beauties have betray’d,
We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
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?
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
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,
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
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.
