Before our lives divide for ever, While time is with us and hands are free, (Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea) I will say no word that a man might say Whose whole life's love goes down in a day; For this could never have been; and never, Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.
Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well outworn? Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the deed forborne? Though joy be done with and grief be vain, Time shall not sever us wholly in twain;
I I weep for Adonais—he is dead! Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!"
II Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierc'd by the shaft which flies In darkness? where was lorn Urania
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
You are a friend then, as I make it out, Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us Will put an ass's head in Fairyland As he would add a shilling to more shillings, All most harmonious, — and out of his Miraculous inviolable increase Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen; And I must wonder what you think of him — All you down there where your small Avon flows By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman. Some, for a guess, would have him riding back To be a farrier there, or say a dyer; Or maybe one of your adept surveyors; Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.
Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea.
We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange. Nay, it is deeper than my sister’s depth and stronger than my brother’s strength, and stranger than the strangeness of my madness.
Aeons upon aeons have passed since the first grey dawn made us visible to one another; and though we have seen the birth and the fullness and the death of many worlds, we are still eager and young.
We are young and eager and yet we are mateless and unvisited, and though we lie in unbroken half embrace, we are uncomforted. And what comfort is there for controlled desire and unspent passion? Whence shall come the flaming god to warm my sister’s bed? And what she-torrent shall quench my brother’s fire? And who is the woman that shall command my heart?
In the stillness of the night my sister murmurs in her sleep the fire-god’s unknown name, and my brother calls afar upon the cool and distant goddess. But upon whom I call in my sleep I know not.
* * *
Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain, That may compassion my impatient grief? Or where shall I unfold my inward pain, That my enriven heart may find relief? Shall I unto the heavenly pow’rs it show, Or unto earthly men that dwell below?
To heavens? Ah, they, alas, the authors were, And workers of my unremedied woe: For they foresee what to us happens here, And they foresaw, yet suffered this be so. From them comes good, from them comes also ill, That which they made, who can them warn to spill.
I.
MIDNIGHT.
"He hath made me to dwell in darkness as those that have been long dead."
All dark!—no light, no ray!
Sun, moon, and stars, all gone!
Dimness of anguish!—utter void!—
Crushed, and alone!
One waste of weary pain,
One dull, unmeaning ache,
A heart too weary even to throb,
Whether the harborline or the east shoreline consummated it was nobody’s biz until you got there, eyelids ashimmer, content with one more dispensation from blue above. And just like we were saying, the people began to show some interest in the mud-choked harbor. It could be summer again for all anyone in our class knew. Yeah, that’s right. Bumped from our dog-perch,
1. Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”
Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,”
So now I have confessed that he is thine, And I my self am mortgaged to thy will, Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still: But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous, and he is kind; He learned but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
So there’s a cabbie in Cairo named Deif. So he found 5,000 bucks in the back seat. So meanwhile his daughter was very sick. So he needed the money for medicine bad. So never mind. So he looked for the fare and gave it back. So then the kid died. So they fired him for doing good deeds on company time.
I He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed.
Beloved beauty who inspires love in me from afar, your face obscured except when your celestial image stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields where light and nature's laughter shine more lovely— was it maybe you who blessed the innocent age called golden, and do you now, blithe spirit,
Like all his people he felt at home in the forest. The silence beneath great trees, the dimness there, The distant high rustling of foliage, the clumps Of fern like little green fountains, patches of sunlight, Patches of moss and lichen, the occasional Undergrowth of hazel and holly, was he aware Of all this? On the contrary his unawareness Was a kind of gratification, a sense of comfort
We are circling, glad of the battle: we joy in the smell of the smoke. Fight on in the hell of the trenches: we publish your names with a croak! Ye will lie in dim heaps when the sunset blows cold on the reddening sand; Yet fight, for the dead will have wages—a death-clutch of dust in the hand.
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