Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused With rain, where thick the crocus blows, Past the dark forges long disused, The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes. The bridge is cross'd, and slow we ride, Through forest, up the mountain-side.
The autumnal evening darkens round, The wind is up, and drives the rain; While, hark! far down, with strangled sound Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain, Where that wet smoke, among the woods, Over his boiling cauldron broods.
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids; I must not laugh, nor weep sins and be wise; Can railing, then, cure these worn maladies? Is not our mistress, fair Religion, As worthy of all our souls' devotion As virtue was in the first blinded age? Are not heaven's joys as valiant to assuage Lusts, as earth's honour was to them? Alas, As we do them in means, shall they surpass Us in the end? and shall thy father's spirit Meet blind philosophers in heaven, whose merit Of strict life may be imputed faith, and hear Thee, whom he taught so easy ways and near To follow, damn'd? Oh, if thou dar'st, fear this;
I stood on a corner eating a peach, the juice running down my arm. A corner in Pergos where he left me, Pergos where I could catch a bus. What was I supposed to do now alone, my hands sticky with it standing on the corner where he left me a Greek peach, big as a softball,
May the Babylonish curse, Strait confound my stammering verse, If I can a passage see In this word-perplexity, Or a fit expression find, Or a language to my mind, (Still the phrase is wide or scant) To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT! Or in any terms relate Half my love, or half my hate: For I hate, yet love, thee so, That, whichever thing I shew, The plain truth will seem to be A constrained hyperbole,
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword, The children of the prophets of the Lord, Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state, The West refused them, and the East abhorred. No anchorage the known world could afford, Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
What say the Bells of San Blas To the ships that southward pass From the harbor of Mazatlan? To them it is nothing more Than the sound of surf on the shore,— Nothing more to master or man.
But to me, a dreamer of dreams, To whom what is and what seems Are often one and the same,— The Bells of San Blas to me Have a strange, wild melody, And are something more than a name.
Before my drift-wood fire I sit, And see, with every waif I burn, Old dreams and fancies coloring it, And folly’s unlaid ghosts return.
O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft The enchanted sea on which they sailed, Are these poor fragments only left Of vain desires and hopes that failed?
Did I not watch from them the light Of sunset on my towers in Spain, And see, far off, uploom in sight The Fortunate Isles I might not gain?
[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I
During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought. Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,— Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
We, the Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants of the University of California, wish to register our protest against the new loyalty oath for the following reasons.
1) The testing of a University faculty by oath is a stupid and insulting procedure. If this oath is to have the effect of eliminating Communists from the faculty, we might as logically eliminate murderers from the faculty by forcing every faculty member to sign an oath saying that he has never committed murder.
2) That such an oath is more dangerous to the liberties of the community than any number of active Communists should be obvious to any student of history. Liberty and democracy are more often overthrown by fear than by stealth. Only countries such as Russia or Spain have institutions so weak and unhealthy that they must be protected by terror.
3) Oaths and other forms of blackmail are destructive to the free working of man's intellect. Since the early Middle Ages universities have zealously guarded their intellectual freedom and have made use of its power to help create the world we know today. The oath that Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to swear is but a distant cousin to the oath we are asked to swear today, but both represent the struggle of the blind and powerful against the minds of free men.
We, who will inherit the branches of learning that one thousand years of free universities have helped to generate, are not Communists and dislike the oath for the same reason we dislike Communism. Both breed stupidity and indignity; both threaten our personal and intellectual freedom. [c. 1949]
Mine own John Poynz, since ye delight to know The cause why that homeward I me draw, And flee the press of courts, whereso they go, Rather than to live thrall under the awe Of lordly looks, wrappèd within my cloak, To will and lust learning to set a law: It is not for because I scorn or mock The power of them, to whom fortune hath lent Charge over us, of right, to strike the stroke. But true it is that I have always meant Less to esteem them than the common sort, Of outward things that judge in their intent Without regard what doth inward resort. I grant sometime that of glory the fire
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play, A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair; When I whose sullen care, Through discontent of my long fruitless stay In prince's court, and expectation vain Of idle hopes, which still do fly away Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain, Walked forth to ease my pain Along the shore of silver streaming Thames, Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems, Was painted all with variable flowers, And all the meads adorned with dainty gems, Fit to deck maidens' bowers,
Torquemada. Now that Castile and Aragon in holy wedlock are Spain, and the last city of the Moors in Spain is Spanish except for Moor and Jew— about every crucifix in every market-place and in the court itself the Jews!— as seven centuries of Christian valor, Christian piety triumph
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