Written by
Edith Wharton |
I
Leaguered in fire
The wild black promontories of the coast extend
Their savage silhouettes;
The sun in universal carnage sets,
And, halting higher,
The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,
Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,
That, balked, yet stands at bay.
Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day
In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,
A wan Valkyrie whose wide pinions shine
Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,
And in her hand swings high o'erhead,
Above the waste of war,
The silver torch-light of the evening star
Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.
II
Lagooned in gold,
Seem not those jetty promontories rather
The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,
Uncomforted of morn, Where old oblivions gather,
The melancholy unconsoling fold
Of all things that go utterly to death
And mix no more, no more
With life's perpetually awakening breath?
Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,
Over such sailless seas,
To walk with hope's slain importunities
In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not
All things be there forgot,
Save the sea's golden barrier and the black
Close-crouching promontories?
Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,
Shall I not wander there, a shadow's shade,
A spectre self-destroyed,
So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
Into the primal void,
That should we on that shore phantasmal meet
I should not know the coming of your feet?
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Written by
Les Murray |
Us all on sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares.
Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-**** in milk to make us randy.
Us back in cool god-****.
We ate crisp.
We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
Us all fuckers then.
And Big, huh? Tusked
the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing.
We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves.
Or bristly, with milk.
Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
Nor the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking.
This gone-already feeling
here in no place with our heads on upside down.
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Written by
Thomas Hardy |
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather.
We climb the road
Beside a chaise.
We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony's load
When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, -
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute.
But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is - that we two passed.
And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love's domain
Never again.
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Written by
Richard Wilbur |
That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray,
Bright thoughts uncut by men:
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray,
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken,
Finding at once the wild supposed bloom,
Or in the imagined cave
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave.
Void notions proper to a buried head!
Beneath these tombstones here
Unseenness fills the sockets of the dead,
Whatever to their souls may now appear;
And who but those unfathomably deaf
Who quiet all this ground
Could catch, within the ear's diminished clef,
A music innocent of time and sound?
What do the living hear, then, when the bell
Hangs plumb within the tower
Of the still church, and still their thoughts compel
Pure tollings that intend no mortal hour?
As when a ferry for the shore of death
Glides looming toward the dock,
Her engines cut, her spirits bating breath
As the ranked pilings narrow toward the shock,
So memory and expectation set
Some pulseless clangor free
Of circumstance, and charm us to forget
This twilight crumbling in the churchyard tree,
Those swifts or swallows which do not pertain,
Scuffed voices in the drive,
That light flicked on behind the vestry pane,
Till, unperplexed from all that is alive,
It shadows all our thought, balked imminence
Of uncommitted sound,
And still would tower at the sill of sense
Were not, as now, its honeyed abeyance crowned
With a mauled boom of summons far more strange
Than any stroke unheard,
Which breaks again with unimagined range
Through all reverberations of the word,
Pooling the mystery of things that are,
The buzz of prayer said,
The scent of grass, the earliest-blooming star,
These unseen gravestones, and the darker dead.
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Written by
Emily Dickinson |
Could Hope inspect her Basis
Her Craft were done --
Has a fictitious Charter
Or it has none --
Balked in the vastest instance
But to renew --
Felled by but one assassin --
Prosperity --
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Written by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
Out from my window westward
I turn full oft my face;
But the mountains rebuke the vision
That would encompass space;
They lift their lofty foreheads
To the kiss of the clouds above,
And ask, "With all our glory,
Can we not win your love?"
I answer, "No, oh mountains!
I see that you are grand;
But you have not the breadth and beauty
Of the fields in my own land;
You narrow my range of vision
And you even shut from me
The voice of my old comrade,
The West Wind wild and free.
"
But to-day I climbed the mountains
On the back of a snow-white steed,
And the West Wind came to greet me--
He flew on the wings of speed.
His charger, and mine that bore me,
Went gaily neck to neck,
Till the town in the valley belkow us
Looked like a small, dark speck.
And oh! what tales he whispered
As he rode there by me,
Of friends whose smiling faces
I am so soon to see.
And the mountains frowned in anger,
Because I balked their spite,
And met my old-time comrade
There on their very height;
But I laughed up in their faces,
As I rode slowly back,
While the Wind went faster and faster,
Like a race-horse on the track.
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Written by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
Thank Fate for foes! I hold mine dear
As valued friends.
He cannot know
The zest of life who runneth here
His earthly race without a foe.
I saw a prize, "Run," cried my friend;
"'T is thine to claim without a doubt.
"
But ere I half-way reached the end,
I felt my strength was giving out.
My foe looked on the while I ran;
A scornful triumph lit his eyes.
With that perverseness born in man
I nerved myself, and won the prize.
All blinded by the crimson glow
Of sin's disguise I tempted Fate.
"I knew thy weakness!" sneered my foe,
I saved myself, and balked his hate.
For half my blessings, half my gain,
I needs must thank my trusty foe;
Despite his envy and disdain,
He serves me well wher'er I go.
So may I keep him to the end,
Nor may his enmity abate;
More faithful that the fondest friend,
He guards me with his hate.
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