SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
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…
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,
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
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
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,
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,
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
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
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
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,
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,
Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,
Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
O quam te memorem virgo...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
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
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
’Tis true, ’tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ’tis light?
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
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 —
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
A boat, beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night
And she made all of light,
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
On Turning up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
