Written by
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson |
Just as the dawn of Love was breaking
Across the weary world of grey,
Just as my life once more was waking
As roses waken late in May,
Fate, blindly cruel and havoc-making,
Stepped in and carried you away.
Memories have I none in keeping
Of times I held you near my heart,
Of dreams when we were near to weeping
That dawn should bid us rise and part;
Never, alas, I saw you sleeping
With soft closed eyes and lips apart,
Breathing my name still through your dreaming.—
Ah! had you stayed, such things had been!
But Fate, unheeding human scheming,
Serenely reckless came between—
Fate with her cold eyes hard and gleaming
Unseared by all the sorrow seen.
Ah! well-beloved, I never told you,
I did not show in speech or song,
How at the end I longed to fold you
Close in my arms; so fierce and strong
The longing grew to have and hold you,
You, and you only, all life long.
They who know nothing call me fickle,
Keen to pursue and loth to keep.
Ah, could they see these tears that trickle
From eyes erstwhile too proud to weep.
Could see me, prone, beneath the sickle,
While pain and sorrow stand and reap!
Unopened scarce, yet overblown, lie
The hopes that rose-like round me grew,
The lights are low, and more than lonely
This life I lead apart from you.
Come back, come back! I want you only,
And you who loved me never knew.
You loved me, pleaded for compassion
On all the pain I would not share;
And I in weary, halting fashion
Was loth to listen, long to care;
But now, dear God! I faint with passion
For your far eyes and distant hair.
Yes, I am faint with love, and broken
With sleepless nights and empty days;
I want your soft words fiercely spoken,
Your tender looks and wayward ways—
Want that strange smile that gave me token
Of many things that no man says.
Cold was I, weary, slow to waken
Till, startled by your ardent eyes,
I felt the soul within me shaken
And long-forgotten senses rise;
But in that moment you were taken,
And thus we lost our Paradise!
Farewell, we may not now recover
That golden "Then" misspent, passed by,
We shall not meet as loved and lover
Here, or hereafter, you and I.
My time for loving you is over,
Love has no future, but to die.
And thus we part, with no believing
In any chance of future years.
We have no idle self-deceiving,
No half-consoling hopes and fears;
We know the Gods grant no retrieving
A wasted chance. Fate knows no tears.
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Written by
Archibald MacLeish |
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change
And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass
And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on
And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown
And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls
And Spain go under the the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land
Nor now the long light on the sea
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...
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Written by
Amy Lowell |
Softly the water ripples
Against the canoe's curving side,
Softly the birch trees rustle
Flinging over us branches wide.
Softly the moon glints and glistens
As the water takes and leaves,
Like golden ears of corn
Which fall from loose-bound sheaves,
Or like the snow-white petals
Which drop from an overblown rose,
When Summer ripens to Autumn
And the freighted year must close.
From the shore come the scents of a garden,
And between a gap in the trees
A proud white statue glimmers
In cold, disdainful ease.
The child of a southern people,
The thought of an alien race,
What does she in this pale, northern garden,
How reconcile it with her grace?
But the moon in her wayward beauty
Is ever and always the same,
As lovely as when upon Latmos
She watched till Endymion came.
Through the water the moon writes her legends
In light, on the smooth, wet sand;
They endure for a moment, and vanish,
And no one may understand.
All round us the secret of Nature
Is telling itself to our sight,
We may guess at her meaning but never
Can know the full mystery of night.
But her power of enchantment is on us,
We bow to the spell which she weaves,
Made up of the murmur of waves
And the manifold whisper of leaves.
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Written by
Alan Seeger |
So when the verdure of his life was shed,
With all the grace of ripened manlihead,
And on his locks, but now so lovable,
Old age like desolating winter fell,
Leaving them white and flowerless and forlorn:
Then from his bed the Goddess of the Morn
Softly withheld, yet cherished him no less
With pious works of pitying tenderness;
Till when at length with vacant, heedless eyes,
And hoary height bent down none otherwise
Than burdened willows bend beneath their weight
Of snow when winter winds turn temperate, --
So bowed with years -- when still he lingered on:
Then to the daughter of Hyperion
This counsel seemed the best: for she, afar
By dove-gray seas under the morning star,
Where, on the wide world's uttermost extremes,
Her amber-walled, auroral palace gleams,
High in an orient chamber bade prepare
An everlasting couch, and laid him there,
And leaving, closed the shining doors. But he,
Deathless by Jove's compassionless decree,
Found not, as others find, a dreamless rest.
There wakeful, with half-waking dreams oppressed,
Still in an aural, visionary haze
Float round him vanished forms of happier days;
Still at his side he fancies to behold
The rosy, radiant thing beloved of old;
And oft, as over dewy meads at morn,
Far inland from a sunrise coast is borne
The drowsy, muffled moaning of the sea,
Even so his voice flows on unceasingly, --
Lisping sweet names of passion overblown,
Breaking with dull, persistent undertone
The breathless silence that forever broods
Round those colossal, lustrous solitudes.
Times change. Man's fortune prospers, or it falls.
Change harbors not in those eternal halls
And tranquil chamber where Tithonus lies.
But through his window there the eastern skies
Fall palely fair to the dim ocean's end.
There, in blue mist where air and ocean blend,
The lazy clouds that sail the wide world o'er
Falter and turn where they can sail no more.
There singing groves, there spacious gardens blow --
Cedars and silver poplars, row on row,
Through whose black boughs on her appointed night,
Flooding his chamber with enchanted light,
Lifts the full moon's immeasurable sphere,
Crimson and huge and wonderfully near.
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Written by
Isaac Watts |
Praise for protection, grace, and truth.
My God, in whom are all the springs
Of boundless love, and grace unknown,
Hide me beneath thy spreading wings,
Till the dark cloud is overblown.
Up to the heav'ns I send my cry,
The Lord will my desires perform;
He sends his angel from the sky,
And saves me from the threat'ning storm.
Be thou exalted, O my God,
Above the heav'ns, where angels dwell;
Thy power on earth be known abroad,
And land to land thy wonders tell.
My heart is fixed; my song shall raise
Immortal honors to thy name;
Awake, my tongue, to sound his praise,
My tongue, the glory of my frame.
High o'er the earth his mercy reigns,
And reaches to the utmost sky;
His truth to endless years remains,
When lower worlds dissolve and die.
Be thou exalted, O my God,
Above the heav'ns, where angels dwell;
Thy power on earth be known abroad,
And land to land thy wonders tell.
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Written by
Isaac Watts |
Prayer for deliverance answered.
Isa. 26:12,20,21.
In thine own ways, O God of love,
We wait the visits of thy grace,
Our soul's desire is to thy name,
And the remembrance of thy face.
My thoughts are searching, Lord, for thee
'Mongst the black shades of lonesome night;
My earnest cries salute the skies
Before the dawn restore the light.
Look, how rebellious men deride
The tender patience of my God!
But they shall see thy lifted hand,
And feel the scourges of thy rod.
Hark! the Eternal rends the sky,
A mighty voice before him goes;
A voice of music to his friends,
But threat'ning thunder to his foes.
Come, children, to your Father's arms,
Hide in the chambers of my grace,
Till the fierce storms be overblown,
And my revenging fury cease.
My sword shall boast its thousands slain,
And drink the blood of haughty kings,
While heav'nly peace around my flock
Stretches its soft and shady wings.
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