Famous Long Visionary Poems

Famous Long Visionary Poems. Long Visionary Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Visionary long poems

See also: Long Member Poems

 TERRIFIC FIEND! thou Monster fell, 
Condemn'd in haunts profane to dwell, 
Why quit thy solitary Home, 
O'er wide Creation's paths to roam? 
Pale Tyrant of the timid Heart, 
Whose visionary spells can bind 
The strongest passions of the mind, 
Freezing Life's current with thy baneful Art. 

Nature recoils when thou art near, 
For round thy form all plagues are seen; 
Thine is the frantic tone, the sullen mien, 
The glance of petrifying fear, 
The haggard Brow, the low'ring Eye, 
The hollow Cheek, the smother'd Sigh, 
When thy usurping fangs assail, 
The sacred Bonds of Friendship fail. 
Meek-bosom'd Pity sues in vain; 
Imperious Sorrow spurns relief, 
Feeds on the luxury of Grief, 
Drinks the hot Tear, and hugs the galling Chain. 

AH! plunge no more thy ruthless dart, 
In the dark centre of the guilty Heart; 
The POW'R SUPREME, with pitying eye, 
Looks on the erring Child of Misery; 
MERCY arrests the wing of Time; 
To expiate the wretch's crime; 
Insulted HEAV'N consign'd thy brand 
To the first Murd'rer's crimson hand. 
Swift o'er the earth the Monster flew, 
And round th' ensanguin'd Poisons threw, 
By CONSCIENCE goaded­driven by FEAR, 
Till the meek Cherub HOPE subdued his fell career. 

Thy Reign...
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 Ah, stay thy treacherous hand, forbear to trace
Those faultless forms of elegance and grace!
Ah, cease to spread the bright transparent mass,
With Titian's pencil, o'er the speaking glass!
Nor steal, by strokes of art with truth combin'd,
The fond illusions of my wayward mind!
For long, enamour'd of a barbarous age,
A faithless truant to the classic page;
Long have I lov'd to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rime;
To view the festive rites, the knightly play,
That deck'd heroic Albion's elder day;
To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold,
And the rough castle, cast in giant mould;
With Gothic manners Gothic arts explore,
And muse on the magnificence of yore.

But chief, enraptur'd have I lov'd to roam,
A lingering votary, the vaulted dome,
Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride,
Their mingling branches shoot from side to side;
Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew,
O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew;
Where Superstition with capricious hand
In many a maze the wreathed window plann'd,
With hues romantic ting'd the gorgeous pane,
To fill with holy light the wondrous fane;
To aid the builder's model, richly rude,
By no Vitruvian symmetry subdu'd;
To suit the genius of the mystic pile:
Whilst as around the far-retiring aisle,
And fretted shrines, with hoary trophies hung,
Her dark illumination wide she...
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 My spirit only lived to look on Beauty's face,
As only when they clasp the arms seem served aright;
As in their flesh inheres the impulse to embrace,
To gaze on Loveliness was my soul's appetite.

I have roamed far in search; white road and plunging bow
Were keys in the blue doors where my desire was set;
Obedient to their lure, my lips and laughing brow
The hill-showers and the spray of many seas have wet.

Hot are enamored hands, the fragrant zone unbound,
To leave no dear delight unfelt, unfondled o'er,
The will possessed my heart to girdle Earth around
With their insatiate need to wonder and adore.

The flowers in the fields, the surf upon the sands,
The sunset and the clouds it turned to blood and wine,
Were shreds of the thin veil behind whose beaded strands
A radiant visage rose, serene, august, divine.

A noise of summer wind astir in starlit trees,
A song where sensual love's delirium rose and fell,
Were rites that moved my soul more than the devotee's
When from the blazing choir rings out the altar bell.

I woke amid the pomp of a proud palace; writ
In tinted arabesque on walls that gems o'erlay,
The names of caliphs were who once held court in it,
Their baths and bowers were mine to...
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In his village grey
At foot of the dykes, that encompass him
With weary weaving of curves and lines
Toward the sea outstretching dim,
The rope-maker, visionary white.
Stepping backwards along the way,
Prudently 'twixt his hands combines
The distant threads, in their twisting play.
That come to him from the infinite.


When day is gone.
Through ardent, weary evenings, yon
The whirr of a wheel can yet be heard;
Something by unseen hands is stirred.
And parallel o'er the rakes, that trace
An even space
From point to point along all the way,
The flaxen hemp still plaits its chain
Ceaseless, for days and weeks amain.
With his poor, tired fingers, nimble still.
Fearing to break for want of skill
The fragments of gold that the gliding light
Threads through his toil so scantily—
Passing the walls and the houses by
The rope-maker, visionary white,
From depths of the evening's whirlpool dim,
Draws the horizons in to him.


Horizons that stretch back afar.
Where strife, regrets, hates, furies are:
Tears of the silence, and the tears
That find a voice: serenest years,
Or years convulsed with pang and throe:
Horizons of the long ago,
These gestures of the Past they shew.


Of old—as one in sleep, life, errant, strayed
Its wondrous morns and fabled evenings through;
When God's right hand toward far Canaan's blue
Traced golden paths, deep in the twilight shade.


Of old, 'twas life...
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 Laura! a sunrise seems to break
Where'er thy happy looks may glow.
Joy sheds its roses o'er thy cheek,
Thy tears themselves do but bespeak
The rapture whence they flow;
Blest youth to whom those tears are given--
The tears that change his earth to heaven;
His best reward those melting eyes--
For him new suns are in the skies!

Thy soul--a crystal river passing,
Silver-clear, and sunbeam-glassing,
Mays into bloom sad Autumn by thee;
Night and desert, if they spy thee,
To gardens laugh--with daylight shine,
Lit by those happy smiles of thine!
Dark with cloud the future far
Goldens itself beneath thy star.
Smilest thou to see the harmony
Of charm the laws of Nature keep?
Alas! to me the harmony
Brings only cause to weep!

Holds not Hades its domain
Underneath this earth of ours?
Under palace, under fame,
Underneath the cloud-capped towers?
Stately cities soar and spread
O'er your mouldering bones, ye dead!
From corruption, from decay,
Springs yon clove-pink's fragrant bloom;
Yon gay waters wind their way
From the hollows of a tomb.

From the planets thou mayest know
All the change that shifts below,
Fled--beneath that zone of rays,
Fled to night a thousand Mays;
Thrones a thousand--rising--sinking,
Earth from thousand slaughters drinking
Blood profusely poured as water;--
Of the sceptre--of the slaughter--
Wouldst thou know what trace remaineth?
Seek them where the dark king reigneth!

Scarce thine eye can ope and close
Ere life's...
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 From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas
Oft come repenting tempests here to die;
Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,
They shrive to priestly pines with many a sigh,
Breathe salutary balms through lank-lock'd hair
Of sick men's heads, and soon -- this world outworn --
Sink into saintly heavens of stirless air,
Clean from confessional. One died, this morn,
And willed the world to wise Queen Tranquil: she,
Sweet sovereign Lady of all souls that bide
In contemplation, tames the too bright skies
Like that faint agate film, far down descried,
Restraining suns in sudden thoughtful eyes
Which flashed but now. Blest distillation rare
Of o'er-rank brightness filtered waterwise
Through all the earths in heaven -- thou always fair,
Still virgin bride of e'er-creating thought --
Dream-worker, in whose dream the Future's wrought --
Healer of hurts, free balm for bitter wrongs --
Most silent mother of all sounding songs --
Thou that dissolvest hells to make thy heaven --
Thou tempest's heir, that keep'st no tempest leaven --
But after winds' and thunders' wide mischance
Dost brood, and better thine inheritance --
Thou privacy of space, where each grave Star
As in his own still chamber sits afar
To meditate, yet, by thy walls unpent,
Shines to his fellows o'er the firmament --
Oh! as thou liv'st in all this sky and sea
That likewise lovingly...
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1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passion of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in the comforts of sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his...
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 LOVE, I renounce thy tyrant sway,
I mock thy fascinating art,
MINE, be the calm unruffled day,
That brings no torment to the heart; 
The tranquil mind, the noiseless scene, 
Where FANCY, with enchanting mien, 
Shall in her right-hand lead along 
The graceful patroness of Song;
Where HARMONY shall softly fling 
Her light tones o'er the dulcet string; 
And with her magic LYRE compose 
Each pang that throbs, each pulse that glows; 
Till her resistless strains dispense, 
The balm of blest INDIFFERENCE. 

LOVE, I defy thy vaunted pow'r!
In still Retirement's sober bow'r
I'll rest secure;­no fev'rish pain
Shall dart its hot-shafts thro' my brain, 
No start'ling dreams invade my mind 
No spells my stagnate pulses bind; 
No jealous agonies impart 
Their madd'ning poisons to my heart 
But sweetly lull'd to placid rest, 
The sensate tenant of my breast 
Shall one unshaken course pursue, 
Such as thy vot'ries never knew.­ 

SWEET SOLITUDE ! pure Nature's child, 
Fair pensive daughter of the wild; 
Nymph of the Forest; thee I press 
My weary sick'ning soul to bless; 
To give my heart the dear repose, 
That smiles unmov'd at transient woes; 
That shelter'd from Life's trivial cares, 
Each calm delicious comfort shares; 
While conscious rectitude of mind, 
Blends with...
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 An old man cocked his car upon a bridge;
 He and his friend, their faces to the South,
 Had trod the uneven road. Their hoots were soiled,
 Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape;
 They had kept a steady pace as though their beds,
 Despite a dwindling and late-risen moon,
 Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.

Aherne. What made that Sound?

Robartes. A rat or water-hen
Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.
We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton's Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find.

Ahernc. Why should not you
Who know it all ring at his door, and speak
Just truth enough to show that his whole life
Will scarcely find for him a broken crust
Of all those truths that are your daily bread;
And when you have spoken take the roads again?

Robartes. He wrote of me in that extravagant style
He...
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 There is a power whose inspiration fills 
Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought, 
Like airy dew ere any drop distils, 
Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught 
Unseen which interfused throughout the whole 
Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul. 
Now when, the drift of old desire renewing, 
Warm tides flow northward over valley and field, 
When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing 
From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed 
Such memories as breathe once more 
Of childhood and the happy hues it wore, 
Now, with a fervor that has never been 
In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, -- 
Not as a force whose fountains are within 
The faculties of the percipient mind, 
Subject with them to darkness and decay, 
But something absolute, something beyond, 
Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer 
From pale horizons, luminous behind 
Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day; 
And in this flood of the reviving year, 
When to the loiterer by sylvan streams, 
Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest, 
Nature in every common aspect seems 
To comment on the burden in his breast -- 
The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams...
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 This, then, is she, 
My mother as she looked at seventeen, 
When she first met my father. Young incredibly, 
Younger than spring, without the faintest trace 
Of disappointment, weariness, or tean 
Upon the childlike earnestness and grace 
Of the waiting face. 
Those close-wound ropes of pearl 
(Or common beads made precious by their use) 
Seem heavy for so slight a throat to wear; 
But the low bodice leaves the shoulders bare 
And half the glad swell of the breast, for news 
That now the woman stirs within the girl. 
And yet, 
Even so, the loops and globes 
Of beaten gold 
And jet 
Hung, in the stately way of old, 
From the ears' drooping lobes 
On festivals and Lord's-day of the week, 
Show all too matron-sober for the cheek, -- 
Which, now I look again, is perfect child, 
Or no -- or no -- 't is girlhood's very self, 
Moulded by some deep, mischief-ridden elf 
So meek, so maiden mild, 
But startling the close gazer with the sense 
Of passions forest-shy and forest-wild, 
And delicate delirious merriments. 

As a moth beats sidewise 
And up and over, and tries 
To skirt the irresistible lure 
Of the flame that has him sure,...
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 Kind solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme-
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell'd in-
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope- that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can hope- Oh God! I can-
Its fount is holier- more divine-
I would not call thee fool, old man,
But such is not a gift of thine.

Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bow'd from its wild pride into shame.
O yearning heart! I did inherit
Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again-
O craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
The undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness- a knell.

I have not always been as now:
The fever'd diadem on my brow
I claim'd and won usurpingly-
Hath not the same fierce heirdom given
Rome to the Caesar- this to me?
The heritage of a kingly mind,
And a proud spirit which hath striven
Triumphantly with human kind.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay...
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 High, on the Solitude of Alpine Hills,
O'er-topping the grand imag'ry of Nature,
Where one eternal winter seem'd to reign;
An HERMIT'S threshold, carpetted with moss,
Diversified the Scene. Above the flakes
Of silv'ry snow, full many a modest flow'r
Peep'd through its icy veil, and blushing ope'd
Its variegated hues; The ORCHIS sweet,
The bloomy CISTUS, and the fragrant branch
Of glossy MYRTLE. In his rushy cell,
The lonely ANCHORET consum'd his days,
Unnotic'd, and unblest. In early youth,
Cross'd in the fond affections of his soul
By false Ambition, from his parent home
He, solitary, wander'd; while the Maid
Whose peerless beauty won his yielding heart
Pined in monastic horrors ! Near his sill
A little cross he rear'd, where, prostrate low
At day's pale glimpse, or when the setting Sun
Tissued the western sky with streamy gold,
His Orisons he pour'd, for her, whose hours
Were wasted in oblivion. Winters pass'd,
And Summers faded, slow, unchearly all
To the lone HERMIT'S sorrows: For, still, Love
A dark, though unpolluted altar, rear'd
On the white waste of wonders!
From the peak
Which mark'd his neighb'ring Hut, his humid Eye
Oft wander'd o'er the rich expanse below;
Oft trac'd the glow of vegetating Spring,
The full-blown Summer splendours, and the hue
Of tawny scenes Autumnal: Vineyards vast,
Clothing the upland scene, and spreading wide
The promised tide nectareous; while for him
The...
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 'Twas at that hour of beauty when the setting sun
squandereth his cloudy bed with rosy hues, to flood
his lov'd works as in turn he biddeth them Good-night;
and all the towers and temples and mansions of men
face him in bright farewell, ere they creep from their pomp
naked beneath the darkness;- while to mortal eyes
'tis given, ifso they close not of fatigue, nor strain
at lamplit tasks-'tis given, as for a royal boon
to beggarly outcasts in homeless vigil, to watch
where uncurtain's behind the great windows of space
Heav'n's jewel'd company circleth unapproachably-
'Twas at sunset that I, fleeing to hide my soul
in refuge of beauty from a mortal distress,
walk'd alone with the Muse in her garden of thought,
discoursing at liberty with the mazy dreams
that came wavering pertinaciously about me; as when
the small bats, issued from their hangings, flitter o'erhead
thru' the summer twilight, with thin cries to and fro
hunting in muffled flight atween the stars and flowers.
Then fell I in strange delusion, illusion strange to tell;
for as a man who lyeth fast asleep in his bed
may dream he waketh, and that he walketh upright
pursuing some endeavour in full conscience-so 'twas
with me; but contrawise; for being in truth awake
methought I slept and dreamt; and in thatt...
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 Shall the great soul of Newton quit this earth, 
To mingle with his stars; and every muse,
Astonish'd into silence, shun the weight
Of honours due to his illustrious name?
But what can man?--Even now the sons of light,
In strains high-warbled to seraphic lyre,
Hail his arrival on the coast of bliss.
Yet am not I deterr'd, though high the theme,
And sung to harps of angels, for with you,
Ethereal flames! ambitious, I aspire
In Nature's general symphony to join. 

And what new wonders can ye show your guest!
Who, while on this dim spot, where mortals toil
Clouded in dust, from motion's simple laws,
Could trace the secret hand of Providence,
Wide-working through this universal frame. 

Have ye not listen'd while he bound the suns
And planets to their spheres! th' unequal task
Of humankind till then. Oft had they roll'd
O'er erring man the year, and oft disgrac'd
The pride of schools, before their course was known
Full in its causes and effects to him,
All-piercing sage! who sat not down and dream'd
Romantic schemes, defended by the din
Of specious words, and tyranny of names;
But, bidding his amazing mind attend,
And with heroic patience years on years
Deep-searching, saw at last the system dawn,
And shine, of all his race, on him alone. 

What were his raptures then!...
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