For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honor, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face Contemplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill
I In a far country, and a distant age, Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth, A boy was born of humble parentage; The stars that shone upon his lonely birth Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame— Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
II ’T is said that on the night when he was born, A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room; Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn, And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom;
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
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.
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks:
I GLOOM! An October like November; August a hundred thousand hours, And all September, A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . . And doom! That then was Antwerp. . . In the name of God, How could they do it? Those souls that usually dived Into the dirty caverns of mines; Who usually hived In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;
Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed, Long curved sail needles of the green pitch pine, With common sandgrass, skirt the horizon line, And over these the incorruptible blue!
Yet, even ‘mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes, Early my heart a deeper lesson learnt; Wandering alone by many a mile burnt Black woodside, that but the snow-flake decks and drapes. And I have stood beneath Canadian sky, In utter solitudes, where the cricket’s cry
Dank fens of cedar; hemlock-branches gray With trees and trail of mosses, wringing-wet; Beds of the black pitchpine in dead leaves set Whose wasted red has wasted to white away;
I that have been a lover, and could show it, Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumb, Since I exscribe your sonnets, am become A better lover, and much better poet. Nor is my Muse or I ashamed to owe it To those true numerous graces, whereof some But charm the senses, others overcome Both brains and hearts; and mine now best do know it:
How oft in schoolboy-days, from the school’s sway Have I run forth to Nature as to a friend,— With some pretext of o’erwrought sight, to spend My school-time in green meadows far away!
The poet’s duties: no need to stress The subject’s dullness, nonetheless Here’s an incestuous address In Robert Burns’ style To one whom all the Muses bless At Great Turnstile.
I’ve no excuses for this theme. Prescription is less popular than dream
Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting you were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain brown envelopes for the return of your very “Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues give the fullest treatment in literature yet
Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars Could swifter speed, or slower, round the sun, Than in this year of variance thou hast done For me. Yet pain, fear, heart-break, woes, and wars
How well do I recall that walk in state Across the Common, by the paths we knew: Myself in silver badge and riband blue, My little sister with her book and slate; The elm tree by the Pond, the fence of wood, The burial place that at the corner stood
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