Written by
Duncan Campbell Scott |
Here is the height of land:
The watershed on either hand
Goes down to Hudson Bay
Or Lake Superior;
The stars are up, and far away
The wind sounds in the wood, wearier
Than the long Ojibwa cadence
In which Potàn the Wise
Declares the ills of life
And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound
Of acquiescence. The fires burn low
With just sufficient glow
To light the flakes of ash that play
At being moths, and flutter away
To fall in the dark and die as ashes:
Here there is peace in the lofty air,
And Something comes by flashes
Deeper than peace: --
The spruces have retired a little space
And left a field of sky in violet shadow
With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.
Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;
There is no sound unless the soul can hear
The gathering of the waters in their sources.
We have come up through the spreading lakes
From level to level, --
Pitching our tents sometimes over a revel
Of roses that nodded all night,
Dreaming within our dreams,
To wake at dawn and find that they were captured
With no dew on their leaves;
Sometimes mid sheaves
Of bracken and dwarf-cornel, and again
On a wide blueberry plain
Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;
A rocky islet followed
With one lone poplar and a single nest
Of white-throat-sparrows that took no rest
But sang in dreams or woke to sing, --
To the last portage and the height of land --:
Upon one hand
The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,
And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,
Glimmering all night
In the cold arctic light;
On the other hand
The crowded southern land
With all the welter of the lives of men.
But here is peace, and again
That Something comes by flashes
Deeper than peace, -- a spell
Golden and inappellable
That gives the inarticulate part
Of our strange being one moment of release
That seems more native than the touch of time,
And we must answer in chime;
Though yet no man may tell
The secret of that spell
Golden and inappellable.
Now are there sounds walking in the wood,
And all the spruces shiver and tremble,
And the stars move a little in their courses.
The ancient disturber of solitude
Breathes a pervasive sigh,
And the soul seems to hear
The gathering of the waters at their sources;
Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark;
The region-spirit murmurs in meditation,
The heart replies in exaltation
And echoes faintly like an inland shell
Ghost tremors of the spell;
Thought reawakens and is linked again
With all the welter of the lives of men.
Here on the uplands where the air is clear
We think of life as of a stormy scene, --
Of tempest, of revolt and desperate shock;
And here, where we can think, on the brights uplands
Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on life
Until the tempest parts, and it appears
As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:
A Something to be guided by ideals --
That in themselves are simple and serene --
Of noble deed to foster noble thought,
And noble thought to image noble deed,
Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,
Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt
Whether the perfect beauty that escapes
Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing
Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:
Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest
The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,
And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.
The ancient disturber of solitude
Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,
And the dark wood
Is stifled with the pungent fume
Of charred earth burnt to the bone
That takes the place of air.
Then sudden I remember when and where, --
The last weird lakelet foul with weedy growths
And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,
Skin of vile water over viler mud
Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,
And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,
Not to be urged toward the fatal shore
Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden roar
Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with light
And terror. It had left the portage-height
A tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,
Covered still with patches of bright fire
Smoking with incense of the fragment resin
That even then began to thin and lessen
Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.
'Tis overpast. How strange the stars have grown;
The presage of extinction glows on their crests
And they are beautied with impermanence;
They shall be after the race of men
And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,
Entangled in the meshes of bright words.
A lemming stirs the fern and in the mosses
Eft-minded things feel the air change, and dawn
Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.
How often in the autumn of the world
Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be rebuilt
With deeper meaning! Shall the poet then,
Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,
Brood on the welter of the lives of men
And dream of his ideal hope and promise
In the blush sunrise? Shall he base his flight
Upon a more compelling law than Love
As Life's atonement; shall the vision
Of noble deed and noble thought immingled
Seem as uncouth to him as the pictograph
Scratched on the cave side by the cave-dweller
To us of the Christ-time? Shall he stand
With deeper joy, with more complex emotion,
In closer commune with divinity,
With the deep fathomed, with the firmament charted,
With life as simple as a sheep-boy's song,
What lies beyond a romaunt that was read
Once on a morn of storm and laid aside
Memorious with strange immortal memories?
Or shall he see the sunrise as I see it
In shoals of misty fire the deluge-light
Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,
And feel the lulled earth, older in pulse and motion,
Turn the rich lands and inundant oceans
To the flushed color, and hear as now I hear
The thrill of life beat up the planet's margin
And break in the clear susurrus of deep joy
That echoes and reëchoes in my being?
O Life is intuition the measure of knowledge
And do I stand with heart entranced and burning
At the zenith of our wisdom when I feel
The long light flow, the long wind pause, the deep
Influx of spirit, of which no man may tell
The Secret, golden and inappellable?
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Written by
Robert Browning |
Si credere dignum est.--Virgil, Georgics, III, 390
Oh, worthy of belief I hold it was,
Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines!
No question, that adventure came to pass
One black night in Arcadia: yes, the pines,
Mountains and valleys mingling made one mass
Of black with void black heaven: the earth's confines,
The sky's embrace,--below, above, around,
All hardened into black without a bound.
Fill up a swart stone chalice to the brim
With fresh-squeezed yet fast-thickening poppy-juice:
See how the sluggish jelly, late a-swim,
Turns marble to the touch of who would loose
The solid smooth, grown jet from rim to rim,
By turning round the bowl! So night can fuse
Earth with her all-comprising sky. No less,
Light, the least spark, shows air and emptiness.
And thus it proved when--diving into space,
Stript of all vapor, from each web of mist,
Utterly film-free--entered on her race
The naked Moon, full-orbed antagonist
Of night and dark, night's dowry: peak to base,
Upstarted mountains, and each valley, kissed
To sudden life, lay silver-bright: in air
Flew she revealed, Maid-Moon with limbs all bare.
Still as she fled, each depth,--where refuge seemed--
Opening a lone pale chamber, left distinct
Those limbs: mid still-retreating blue, she teemed
Herself with whiteness,--virginal, uncinct
By any halo save what finely gleamed
To outline not disguise her: heavenwas linked
In one accord with earth to quaff the joy,
Drain beauty to the dregs without alloy.
Whereof she grew aware. What help? When, lo,
A succorable cloud with sleep lay dense:
Some pinetree-top had caught it sailing slow,
And tethered for a prize: in evidence
Captive lay fleece on fleece of piled-up snow
Drowsily patient: flake-heaped how or whence,
The structure of that succorable cloud,
What matter? Shamed she plunged into its shroud.
Orbed--so the woman-figure poets call
Because of rounds on rounds--that apple-shaped
Head which its hair binds close into a ball
Each side the curving ears--that pure undraped
Pout of the sister paps--that . . . once for all,
Say--her consummate circle thus escaped
With its innumerous circlets, sank absorbed,
Safe in the cloud--O naked Moon full-orbed!
But what means this? The downy swathes combine,
Conglobe, the smothery coy-caressing stuff
Curdles about her! Vain each twist and twine
Those lithe limbs try, encroached on by a fluff
Fitting as close as fits the dented spine
Its flexible ivory outside-flesh: enough!
The plumy drifts contract, condense, constringe,
Till she is swallowed by the feathery springe.
As when a pearl slips lost in the thin foam
Churned on a sea-shore, and, o'er-frothed, conceits
Herself safe-housed in Amphitrite's dome,--
If, through the bladdery wave-worked yeast, she meets
What most she loathes and leaps from,--elf from gnome
No gladlier,--finds that safest of retreats
Bubble about a treacherous hand wide ope
To grasp her--(divers who pick pearls so grope)--
So lay this Maid-Moon clasped around and caught
By rough red Pan, the god of all that tract:
He it was schemed the snare thus subtly wrought
With simulated earth-breath,--wool-tufts packed
Into a billowy wrappage. Sheep far-sought
For spotless shearings yield such: take the fact
As learned Virgil gives it,--how the breed
Whitens itself forever: yes, indeed!
If one forefather ram, though pure as chalk
From tinge on fleece, should still display a tongue
Black 'neath the beast's moist palate, prompt men balk
The propagating plague: he gets no young:
They rather slay him,--sell his hide to calk
Ships with, first steeped with pitch,--nor hands are wrung
In sorrow for his fate: protected thus,
The purity we loved is gained for us. So did girl-Moon, by just her attribute
Of unmatched modesty betrayed, lie trapped,
Bruised to the breast of Pan, half god half brute,
Raked by his bristly boar-sward while he lapped
--Never say, kissed her! that were to pollute
Love's language--which moreover proves unapt
To tell how she recoiled--as who finds thorns
Where she sought flowers--when, feeling, she touched--horns!
Then--does the legend say?--first moon-eclipse
Happened, first swooning-fit which puzzled sore
The early sages? Is that why she dips
Into the dark, a minute and no more,
Only so long as serves her while she rips
The cloud's womb through and, faultless as before,
Pursues her way? No lesson for a maid
Left she, a maid herself thus trapped, betrayed?
Ha, Virgil? Tell the rest, you! "To the deep
Of his domain the wildwood, Pan forthwith
Called her, and so she followed"--in her sleep,
Surely?--"by no means spurning him." The myth
Explain who may! Let all else go, I keep
--As of a ruin just a monolith--
Thus much, one verse of five words, each a boon:
Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.
|
Written by
Theodore Roethke |
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
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Written by
Ogden Nash |
More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.
I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.
As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That's how much you I love.
I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.
I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,
That's how you're love by me.
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Written by
Vernon Scannell |
Sleepless I lay last night and watched the slow
Procession of the men who wear my clothes:
First, the grey man with bloodshot eyes and sly
Gestures miming what he loves and loathes.
Next came the cheery knocker-back of pints,
The beery joker, never far from tears,
Whose loud and public vanity acquaints
The careful watcher with his private fears.
And then I saw the neat mouthed gentle man
Defer politely, listen to the lies,
Smile at the tedious tale and gaze upon
The little mirrors in the speaker's eyes.
The men who wear my clothes walked past my bed
And all of them looked tired and rather old;
I felt a chip of ice melt in my blood.
Naked I lay last night, and very cold.
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Written by
Horace |
Lydia, by all above,
Why bear so hard on Sybaris, to ruin him with love?
What change has made him shun
The playing-ground, who once so well could bear the dust and sun?
Why does he never sit
On horseback in his company, nor with uneven bit
His Gallic courser tame?
Why dreads he yellow Tiber, as 'twould sully that fair frame?
Like poison loathes the oil,
His arms no longer black and blue with honourable toil,
He who erewhile was known
For quoit or javelin oft and oft beyond the limit thrown?
Why skulks he, as they say
Did Thetis' son before the dawn of Ilion's fatal day,
For fear the manly dress
Should fling him into danger's arms, amid the Lycian press?
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Written by
Isaac Watts |
Intemperance punished and pardoned.
Vain man, on foolish pleasures bent,
Prepares for his own punishment;
What pains, what loathsome maladies,
From luxury and lust arise!
The drunkard feels his vitals waste,
Yet drowns his health to please his taste;
Till all his active powers are lost,
And fainting life draws near the dust.
The glutton groans, and loathes to eat,
His soul abhors delicious meat;
Nature, with heavy loads oppressed,
Would yield to death to be released.
Then how the frighted sinners fly
To God for help with earnest cry!
He hears their groans, prolongs their breath,
And saves them from approaching death.
No med'cines could effect the cure
So quick, so easy, or so sure;
The deadly sentence God repeals,
He sends his sovereign word, and heals.
O may the sons of men record
The wondrous goodness of the Lord!
And let their thankful off'rings prove
How they adore their Maker's love
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Written by
Thomas Moore |
The Ghost of Miltiades came at night,
And he stood by the bed of the Benthamite,
And he said, in a voice, that thrill'd the frame,
"If ever the sound of Marathon's name
Hath fir'd they blood or flush'd thy brow,
Lover of Liberty, rise thee now!"
The Benthamite, yawning, left his bed --
Away to the Stock Exchange he sped,
And he found the Scrip of Greece so high,
That it fir'd his blood, it flush'd his eye,
And oh, 'twas a sight to see,
For never was Greek more Greek than he!
And still as the premium higher went,
His ecstas rose - so much per cent.,
(As we see in a glass, that tells the weather,
The heat and the silver rise together,)
And Liberty sung from the patriot's lip,
While a voice from pocket whisper'd "Scrip!"
The Ghost of Miltiades came again; --
He smil'd as the pale moon smiles through rain,
For his soul was glad at the patriot strain;
(And poor, dear ghost -- how little he knew
The jobs and the tricks of the Philhellene crew!)
"Blessings and thanks!" was all he said,
Then, melting away, like a night-dream, fled!
The Benthamite hears -- amaz'd that ghosts
Could be such fools -- and away he posts,
A patriot still? Ah no, ah no --
Goddess of Freedom, thy scrip is low,
And, warm and fond as they lovers are,
Thou triest their passion, when under par.
The Benthamite's ardour fast decays,
By turns he weeps, and swears, and prays,
And wishes the d--l had Crescent and Cross,
Ere he had been forc'd to sell at a loss.
They quote thim the Stock of various nations,
But, spite of his classical associations,
Lord how he loathes the Greek quotations!
"Who'll buy my Scrip! Who'll buy my Scrip?"
Is now the theme of the patriot's lip,
And he runs to tell how hard his lot is
To Messrs. Orlando and Luriottis,
And says, "Oh Greece, for Liberty's sake,
Do buy my Scrip and I vow to break
Those dark, unholy bonds of thine --
If you'll only consent to buy up mine!"
The Ghost of Miltiades came once more; --
His brow, like the night, was lowering o'er,
And he said, with a look that flash'd dismay,
"Of Liberty's foes the worst are they
Who turn to a trade her cause divine,
And gamble for gold on Freedom's shrine!"
Thus saying, the Ghost, as he took his flight,
Gave a Parthian kick to the Benthamite,
Which sent him, whimpering, off to Jerry --
And vanish'd away to the Stygian ferry!
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Written by
Siegfried Sassoon |
He's got a Blighty wound. He’s safe; and then
War’s fine and bold and bright.
She can forget the doomed and prisoned men
Who agonize and fight.
He’s back in France. She loathes the listless strain
And peril of his plight,
Beseeching Heaven to send him home again,
She prays for peace each night.
Husbands and sons and lovers; everywhere
They die; War bleeds us white
Mothers and wives and sweethearts,—they don’t care
So long as He’s all right.
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Written by
Francesco Petrarch |
SONNET XCIX. Amor, Fortuna, e la mia mente schiva. THE CAUSES OF HIS WOE. Love, Fortune, and my melancholy mind,Sick of the present, lingering on the past,[Pg 114]Afflict me so, that envious thoughts I castOn those who life's dark shore have left behind.Love racks my bosom: Fortune's wintry windKills every comfort: my weak mind at lastIs chafed and pines, so many ills and vastExpose its peace to constant strifes unkind.Nor hope I better days shall turn again;But what is left from bad to worse may pass:For ah! already life is on the wane.Not now of adamant, but frail as glass,I see my best hopes fall from me or fade,And low in dust my fond thoughts broken laid. Macgregor. Love, Fortune, and my ever-faithful mind,Which loathes the present in its memoried past,So wound my spirit, that on all I castAn envied thought who rest in darkness find.My heart Love prostrates, Fortune more unkindNo comfort grants, until its sorrow vastImpotent frets, then melts to tears at last:Thus I to painful warfare am consign'd.My halcyon days I hope not to return,But paint my future by a darker tint;My spring is gone—my summer well-nigh fled:Ah! wretched me! too well do I discernEach hope is now (unlike the diamond flint)A fragile mirror, with its fragments shed. Wollaston.
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