Best Famous Swallow Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Swallow poems. This is a select list of the best famous Swallow poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Swallow poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of swallow poems.

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• All Famous Swallow Poems

Written by Sylvia Plath | Love Is A Parallax 'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy: train tracks always meet, not here, but only in the impossible mind's eye; horizons beat a retreat as we embark on sophist seas to overtake that mark where wave pretends to drench real sky. ' 'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd that one man's devil is another's god or that the solar spectrum is a multitude of shaded grays; suspense on the quicksands of ambivalence is our life's whole nemesis. So we could rave on, darling, you and I, until the stars tick out a lullaby about each cosmic pro and con; nothing changes, for all the blazing of our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move implacably from twelve to one. We raise our arguments like sitting ducks to knock them down with logic or with luck and contradict ourselves for fun; the waitress holds our coats and we put on the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun who insists his playmates run. Now you, my intellectual leprechaun, would have me swallow the entire sun like an enormous oyster, down the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark of comet hara-kiri through the dark should inflame the sleeping town. So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames in dubious doorways forget their monday names, caper with candles in their heads; the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in scattering candy from a zeppelin, playing his prodigal charades. The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish blessings right and left and cry hello, and then hello again in deaf churchyard ears until the starlit stiff graves all carol in reply. Now kiss again: till our strict father leans to call for curtain on our thousand scenes; brazen actors mock at him, multiply pink harlequins and sing in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing while footlights flare and houselights dim. Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins and separate the flutes from violins: the algebra of absolutes explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes that jar, while each polemic jackanapes joins his enemies' recruits. The paradox is that 'the play's the thing': though prima donna pouts and critic stings, there burns throughout the line of words, the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion: an insight like the flight of birds: Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing the secret of their ecstasy's in going; some day, moving, one will drop, and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals only to reopen as flesh congeals: cycling phoenix never stops. So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells and heavens till the spirits squeak surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks away our rationed days and weeks. Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down, and god or void appall us till we drown in our own tears: today we start to pay the piper with each breath, yet love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart.

Written by Wallace Stevens | Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly Among the more irritating minor ideas Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home To Concord, at the edge of things, was this: To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds, Not to transform them into other things, Is only what the sun does every day, Until we say to ourselves that there may be A pensive nature, a mechanical And slightly detestable operandum, free From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like, Without his literature and without his gods . . . No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air, In an element that does not do for us, so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big, A thing not planned for imagery or belief, Not one of the masculine myths we used to make, A transparency through which the swallow weaves, Without any form or any sense of form, What we know in what we see, what we feel in what We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation, In the tumult of integrations out of the sky, And what we think, a breathing like the wind, A moving part of a motion, a discovery Part of a discovery, a change part of a change, A sharing of color and being part of it. The afternoon is visibly a source, Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm, Too much like thinking to be less than thought, Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch, A daily majesty of meditation, That comes and goes in silences of its own. We think, then as the sun shines or does not. We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field Or we put mantles on our words because The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound Like the last muting of winter as it ends. A new scholar replacing an older one reflects A moment on this fantasia. He seeks For a human that can be accounted for. The spirit comes from the body of the world, Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind, The mannerism of nature caught in a glass And there become a spirit's mannerism, A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

Written by Marilyn Hacker | Scars on Paper An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch, she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress. Now one of them's the shadow of a breast with a lost object's half-life, with as much life as an anecdotal photograph: me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist, hiking near Russian River on June first '79: Iva's five-and-a-half. While she was almost twenty, wearing black T-shirts in D. C. , where we hadn't met. You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest. In lines alive with what is not regret, she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back. Persistently, on paper, we exist. Persistently, on paper, we exist. You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact, three thousand miles away. And my intact body is eighteen months paper: the past a fragile eighteen months regime of trust in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed by no statistics. Each day I enact survivor's rituals, blessing the crust I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours in which I didn't or in which I did consider my own death. I am not yet statistically a survivor (that is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers and flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead. She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead. I flirted with her, might have been her friend, but transatlantic schedules intervened. She wrote a book about her Freedom Ride, the wary elders whom she taught to read, — herself half-British, twenty-six, white-blonde, with thirty years to live. And I happened to open up The Nation to that bad news which I otherwise might not have known (not breast cancer: cancer of the brain). Words take the absent friend away again. Alone, I think, she called, alone, upon her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished. The pain and fear some courage extinguished at disaster's denouement come back daily, banal: is that brownish-black mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed between my chest and armpit when I washed rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle ache? I'm not yet desperate enough to take comfort in being predeceased: the anguish when the Harlem doctor, the Jewish dancer, die of AIDS, the Boston seminary's dean succumbs "after brief illness" to cancer. I like mossed slabs in country cemeteries with wide-paced dates, candles in jars, whose tallow glows on summer evenings, desk-lamp yellow. Aglow in summer evening, a desk-lamp's yellow moonlight peruses notebooks, houseplants, texts, while an aging woman thinks of sex in the present tense. Desire may follow, urgent or elegant, cut raw or mellow with wine and ripe black figs: a proof, the next course, a simple question, the complex response, a burning sweetness she will swallow. The opening mind is sexual and ready to embrace, incarnate in its prime. Rippling concentrically from summer's gold disc, desire's iris expands, steady with blood beat. Each time implies the next time. The aging woman hopes she will grow old. The aging woman hopes she will grow old. A younger woman has a dazzling vision of bleeding wrists, her own, the clean incisions suddenly there, two open mouths. They told their speechless secrets, witnesses not called to what occurred with as little volition of hers as these phantom wounds. Intense precision of scars, in flesh, in spirit. I'm enrolled by mine in ranks where now I'm "being brave" if I take off my shirt in a hot crowd sunbathing, or demonstrating for Dyke Pride. Her bravery counters the kitchen knives' insinuation that the scars be made. With, or despite our scars, we stay alive. "With, or despite our scars, we stayed alive until the Contras or the Government or rebel troops came, until we were sent to 'relocation camps' until the archives burned, until we dug the ditch, the grave beside the aspen grove where adolescent boys used to cut class, until we went to the precinct house, eager to behave like citizens. . . " I count my hours and days, finger for luck the word-scarred table which is not my witness, shares all innocent objects' silence: a tin plate, a basement door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys, an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.

Written by Walt Whitman | American Feuillage AMERICA always! Always our own feuillage! Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas! Always California’s golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New Mexico! Always soft-breath’d Cuba! Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes drain’d by the Eastern and Western Seas; The area the eighty-third year of These States—the three and a half millions of square miles; The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main—the thirty thousand miles of river navigation, The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings—Always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches; Always the free range and diversity! always the continent of Democracy! Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers, Kanada, the snows; Always these compact lands—lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge oval lakes; Always the West, with strong native persons—the increasing density there—the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders; All sights, South, North, East—all deeds, promiscuously done at all times, All characters, movements, growths—a few noticed, myriads unnoticed, Through Mannahatta’s streets I walking, these things gathering; On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats wooding up; Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware; In their northerly wilds, beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks, the hills—or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink; In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the water, rocking silently; In farmers’ barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done—they rest standing—they are too tired; Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play around; The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail’d—the farthest polar sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes; White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes; On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight together; In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding—the howl of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk; In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake—in summer visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming; In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black buzzard floating slowly, high beyond the tree tops, Below, the red cedar, festoon’d with tylandria—the pines and cypresses, growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat; Rude boats descending the big Pedee—climbing plants, parasites, with color’d flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees, The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the wind; The camp of Georgia wagoners, just after dark—the supper-fires, and the cooking and eating by whites and *******, Thirty or forty great wagons—the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from troughs, The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees—the flames—with the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and rising; Southern fishermen fishing—the sounds and inlets of North Carolina’s coast—the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery—the large sweep-seines—the windlasses on shore work’d by horses—the clearing, curing, and packing-houses; Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the incisions in the trees—There are the turpentine works, There are the ******* at work, in good health—the ground in all directions is cover’d with pine straw: —In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking; In Virginia, the planter’s son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcom’d and kiss’d by the aged mulatto nurse; On rivers, boatmen safely moor’d at night-fall, in their boats, under shelter of high banks, Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking; Late in the afternoon, the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the Great Dismal Swamp—there are the greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous moss, the cypress tree, and the juniper tree; —Northward, young men of Mannahatta—the target company from an excursion returning home at evening—the musket-muzzles all bear bunches of flowers presented by women; Children at play—or on his father’s lap a young boy fallen asleep, (how his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!) The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the Mississippi—he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eye around; California life—the miner, bearded, dress’d in his rude costume—the stanch California friendship—the sweet air—the graves one, in passing, meets, solitary, just aside the horsepath; Down in Texas, the cotton-field, the *****-cabins—drivers driving mules or oxen before rude carts—cotton bales piled on banks and wharves; Encircling all, vast-darting, up and wide, the American Soul, with equal hemispheres—one Love, one Dilation or Pride; —In arriere, the peace-talk with the Iroquois, the aborigines—the calumet, the pipe of good-will, arbitration, and indorsement, The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward the earth, The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural exclamations, The setting out of the war-party—the long and stealthy march, The single-file—the swinging hatchets—the surprise and slaughter of enemies; —All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of These States—reminiscences, all institutions, All These States, compact—Every square mile of These States, without excepting a particle—you also—me also, Me pleas’d, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok’s fields, Me, observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies, shuffling between each other, ascending high in the air; The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects—the fall traveler southward, but returning northward early in the spring; The country boy at the close of the day, driving the herd of cows, and shouting to them as they loiter to browse by the road-side; The city wharf—Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, San Francisco, The departing ships, when the sailors heave at the capstan; —Evening—me in my room—the setting sun, The setting summer sun shining in my open window, showing the swarm of flies, suspended, balancing in the air in the centre of the room, darting athwart, up and down, casting swift shadows in specks on the opposite wall, where the shine is; The athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners; Males, females, immigrants, combinations—the copiousness—the individuality of The States, each for itself—the money-makers; Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces—the windlass, lever, pulley—All certainties, The certainty of space, increase, freedom, futurity, In space, the sporades, the scatter’d islands, the stars—on the firm earth, the lands, my lands; O lands! all so dear to me—what you are, (whatever it is,) I become a part of that, whatever it is; Southward there, I screaming, with wings slowly flapping, with the myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida—or in Louisiana, with pelicans breeding; Otherways, there, atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the Rio Grande, the Nueces, the Brazos, the Tombigbee, the Red River, the Saskatchawan, or the Osage, I with the spring waters laughing and skipping and running; Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Paumanok, I, with parties of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and aquatic plants; Retreating, triumphantly twittering, the king-bird, from piercing the crow with its bill, for amusement—And I triumphantly twittering; The migrating flock of wild geese alighting in autumn to refresh themselves—the body of the flock feed—the sentinels outside move around with erect heads watching, and are from time to time reliev’d by other sentinels—And I feeding and taking turns with the rest; In Kanadian forests, the moose, large as an ox, corner’d by hunters, rising desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with his fore-feet, the hoofs as sharp as knives—And I, plunging at the hunters, corner’d and desperate; In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, store-houses, and the countless workmen working in the shops, And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof—and no less in myself than the whole of the Mannahatta in itself, Singing the song of These, my ever united lands—my body no more inevitably united, part to part, and made one identity, any more than my lands are inevitably united, and made ONE IDENTITY; Nativities, climates, the grass of the great Pastoral Plains; Cities, labors, death, animals, products, war, good and evil—these me, These affording, in all their particulars, endless feuillage to me and to America, how can I do less than pass the clew of the union of them, to afford the like to you? Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you also be eligible as I am? How can I but, as here, chanting, invite you for yourself to collect bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of These States?

Written by Dorothy Parker | Transition Too long and quickly have I lived to vow The woe that stretches me shall never wane, Too often seen the end of endless pain To swear that peace no more shall cool my brow. I know, I know- again the shriveled bough Will burgeon sweetly in the gentle rain, And these hard lands be quivering with grain- I tell you only: it is Winter now. What if I know, before the Summer goes Where dwelt this bitter frenzy shall be rest? What is it now, that June shall surely bring New promise, with the swallow and the rose? My heart is water, that I first must breast The terrible, slow loveliness of Spring.

Written by Roger McGough | First Day at School A millionbillionwillion miles from home Waiting for the bell to go. (To go where?) Why are they all so big, other children? So noisy? So much at home they Must have been born in uniform Lived all their lives in playgrounds Spent the years inventing games That don't let me in. Games That are rough, that swallow you up. And the railings. All around, the railings. Are they to keep out wolves and monsters? Things that carry off and eat children? Things you don't take sweets from? Perhaps they're to stop us getting out Running away from the lessins. Lessin. What does a lessin look like? Sounds small and slimy. They keep them in the glassrooms. Whole rooms made out of glass. Imagine. I wish I could remember my name Mummy said it would come in useful. Like wellies. When there's puddles. Yellowwellies. I wish she was here. I think my name is sewn on somewhere Perhaps the teacher will read it for me. Tea-cher. The one who makes the tea.

Written by Mark Twain | A Sweltering Day In Australia The Bombola faints in the hot Bowral tree, Where fierce Mullengudgery's smothering fires Far from the breezes of Coolgardie Burn ghastly and blue as the day expires; And Murriwillumba complaineth in song For the garlanded bowers of Woolloomooloo, And the Ballarat Fly and the lone Wollongong They dream of the gardens of Jamberoo; The wallabi sighs for the Murrubidgee, For the velvety sod of the Munno Parah, Where the waters of healing from Muloowurtie Flow dim in the gloaming by Yaranyackah; The Koppio sorrows for lost Wolloway, And sigheth in secret for Murrurundi, The Whangeroo wombat lamenteth the day That made him an exile from Jerrilderie; The Teawamute Tumut from Wirrega's glade, The Nangkita swallow, the Wallaroo swan, They long for the peace of the Timaru shade And thy balmy soft airs, O sweet Mittagong! The Kooringa buffalo pants in the sun, The Kondoparinga lies gaping for breath, The Kongorong Camaum to the shadow has won, But the Goomeroo sinks in the slumber of death; In the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plain The Yatala Wangary withers and dies, And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain, To the Woolgoolga woodlands despairingly flies; Sweet Nangwarry's desolate, Coonamble wails, And Tungkillo Kuito in sables is drest, For the Whangerei winds fall asleep in the sails And the Booleroo life-breeze is dead in the west. Mypongo, Kapunda, O slumber no more Yankalilla, Parawirra, be warned There's death in the air! Killanoola, wherefore Shall the prayer of Penola be scorned? Cootamundra, and Takee, and Wakatipu, Toowoomba, Kaikoura are lost From Onkaparinga to far Oamaru All burn in this hell's holocaust! Paramatta and Binnum are gone to their rest In the vale of Tapanni Taroom, Kawakawa, Deniliquin - all that was best In the earth are but graves and a tomb! Narrandera mourns, Cameron answers not When the roll of the scathless we cry Tongariro, Goondiwindi, Woolundunga, the spot Is mute and forlorn where ye lie.

Written by Anais Nin | The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 1: 1931-1934 "Am I, at bottom, that fervent little Spanish Catholic child who chastised herself for loving toys, who forbade herself the enjoyment of sweet foods, who practiced silence, who humiliated her pride, who adored symbols, statues, burning candles, incense, the caress of nuns, organ music, for whom Communion was a great event? I was so exalted by the idea of eating Jesus's flesh and drinking His blood that I couldn't swallow the host well, and I dreaded harming the it. I visualized Christ descending into my heart so realistically (I was a realist then!) that I could see Him walking down the stairs and entering the room of my heart like a sacred Visitor. That state of this room was a subject of great preoccupation for me. . . At the ages of nine, ten, eleven, I believe I approximated sainthood. And then, at sixteen, resentful of controls, disillusioned with a God who had not granted my prayers (the return of my father), who performed no miracles, who left me fatherless in a strange country, I rejected all Catholicism with exaggeration. Goodness, virtue, charity, submission, stifled me. I took up the words of Lawrence: "They stress only pain, sacrifice, suffering and death. They do not dwell enough on the resurrection, on joy and life in the present. " Today I feel my past like an unbearable weight, I feel that it interferes with my present life, that it must be the cause for this withdrawal, this closing of doors. . . I am embalmed because a nun leaned over me, enveloped me in her veils, kissed me. The chill curse of Christianity. I do not confess any more, I have no remorse, yet am I doing penance for my enjoyments? Nobody knows what a magnificent prey I was for Christian legends, because of my compassion and my tenderness for human beings. Today it divides me from enjoyment in life. " p. 70-71 "As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startling white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing. She lacks the courage of her personality, which is sensual, heavy with experience. Her role alone preoccupies her. She invents dramas in which she always stars. I am sure she creates genuine dramas, genuine chaos and whirlpools of feelings, but I feel that her share in it is a pose. That night, in spite of my response to her, she sought to be whatever she felt I wanted her to be. She is an actress every moment. I cannot grasp the core of June. Everything Henry has said about her is true. " I wanted to run out and kiss her fanatastic beauty and say: 'June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existance. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childlike pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses"

Written by Thomas Gray | Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening-care; No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke: How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke! Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise, Where through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Can storied urn, or animated bust, Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death? Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre; But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of Time, did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village-Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood. Th' applause of list'ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation's eyes, Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the Gates of Mercy on mankind, The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame. Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool sequestered vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. Their name, their years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. For who, to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing ling'ring look behind? On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires. For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonoured dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely Contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall enquire thy fate,— Haply some hoary-headed swain may say "Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn; "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech, That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noon-tide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by. "Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt'ring his wayward fancies would he rove; Now drooping, woeful-wan, like one forlorn, Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love. "One morn I missed him from the customed hill, Along the heath, and near his fav'rite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he: "The next, with dirges due in sad array Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,— Approach and read, for thou can'st read, the lay Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn. " THE EPITAPH Here rests his head upon the lap of earth A Youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown: Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Misery (all he had) a tear, He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose,) The bosom of his Father and his God.

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke | DUINO ELEGIES The First Elegy Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed I that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note Of my dark sobbing. Ah whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels not humans and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside which every day we can take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left. Oh and night: there is night when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at out faces. Whom would it not remain for-that longed-after mildly disillusioning presence which the solitary heart so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers? But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate. Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms Into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying. Yes-the springtime needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past or as you walked under an open window a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always Distracted by expectation as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night. ) But when you feel longing sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them almost) who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified. Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth. But Nature spent and exhausted takes lovers back into herself as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time. Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring objectless love and might say to herself Perhaps I can be like her ? Shouldn't this most ancient suffering finally grow more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and quivering endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself. For there is no place where we can remain. Voices. Voices. Listen my heart as only Saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on impossibly kneeling and didn't notice at all: so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure God's voice-far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence. It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young. Didn't their fate whenever you stepped into a church In Naples or Rome quietly come to address you? Or high up some eulogy entrusted you with a mission as last year on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa. What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death-which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward. Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer to give up customs one barely had time to learn not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one's own first name behind forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity. -Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created. Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it through both realms forever and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar. In the end those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we who do need such great mysteries we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth-: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how in the lament for Linus the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god had suddenly left forever the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.