Of Chesterton, In the County of Huntingdon, Esquire How blessed is he, who leads a Country Life, Unvex’d with anxious Cares, and void of Strife! Who studying Peace, and shunning Civil Rage, Enjoy’d his Youth, and now enjoys his Age:
Thus every Creature, and of every Kind, The secret Joys of sweet Coition find: Not only Man’s Imperial Race; but they That wing the liquid Air, or swim the Sea, Or haunt the Desert, rush into the flame: For Love is Lord of all; and is in all the same. ’Tis with this rage, the Mother Lion stung, Scours o’re the Plain; regardless of her young:
Stars from five wars, scars, Words filled with ice and fear, Nightflares and fogginess, and a studied regularity. Gon’ lay down my sword ’n’ shield— Down by the river side, down by the river side— Down by the river side...
Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless.
'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang,
Alas, my Purse! how lean and low! My silken Purse! what art thou now! One I beheld—but stocks will fall— When both thy ends had wherewithal. When I within thy slender fence My fortune placed, and confidence; A poet’s fortune!—not immense: Yet, mixed with keys, and coins among,
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.
(from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility:
Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly, May gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely, As thou pliest thy trade in this devil’s-smithy— Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?
He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here.
Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, Pound at thy powder,—I am not in haste! Better sit thus and observe thy strange things, Than go where men wait me and dance at the King’s.
Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings For her—maniacal in the clouds. No need for Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates: Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier. Won’t nurse—unlike the magnetic powers—repugnance; Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love.
No terrors lurking in her depths, like those Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom,
I need more time, a simple day in Paris hotels and window shopping. The croissants will not bake themselves and the Tower of London would Like to spend a night in the tropics with gray sassy paint. It has many Wounds and historic serial dreams under contract to Hollywood. Who will play the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who will braid her
Hair? Was it she who left her lips on the block for the executioner, Whose hands would never find ablution, who would never touch a woman Again or eat the flesh of a red animal? Blood pudding would repulse him Until joining Anne. That is the way of history written for Marlow and Shakespear. They are with us now that we are sober and wiser,
Not taking the horrors of poetry too seriously. Why am I telling you this Nonsense, when I have never seen you sip your coffee or tea, In the morning? Not to mention,
Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers,
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been, Where I the rarest things have seen; Oh, things without compare! Such sights again cannot be found In any place on English ground, Be it at wake, or fair.
I’ll tell thee now (dear Love) what thou shalt do To anger destiny, as she doth us, How I shall stay, though she esloygne me thus And how posterity shall know it too; How thine may out-endure Sybil’s glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name.
Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past twixt thee and me, Thence write our annals, and in them will be To all whom love’s subliming fire invades, Rule and example found;
Let the musicians begin, Let every instrument awaken and instruct us In love’s willing river and love’s dear discipline: We wait, silent, in consent and in the penance Of patience, awaiting the serene exaltation Which is the liberation and conclusion of expiation.
Now may the chief musician say: “Lust and emulation have dwelt amoung us
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