Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267) While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
Do not allow me to sink, I said To a top floating ribbon of kelp. As I was lifted on each wave And made to slide into the vale I wanted not to drown. I wanted To make it all right with my dear, To tell my cat I’ll be away, To have them all destroyed, the poems
Beholde, o man! lyft up thyn eye and see What mortall peyne I suffre for thi trespace. With pietous voys I crye and sey to the: Beholde my woundes, behold my blody face, Beholde the rebukes that do me so manace, Beholde my enemyes that do me so despice, And how that I, to reforme the to grace, Was like a lambe offred in sacryfice.
...
And geyn thi pryde behold my gret mekenesse; Geyn thyn envie behold my charité; Geyn thi leccherye behold my chast clennesse; Geyn thi covetyse behold my poverté.
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;
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.
Ugliest little boy that everyone ever saw. That is what everyone said.
Even to his mother it was apparent— when the blue-aproned nurse came into the northeast end of the maternity ward bearing his squeals and plump bottom looped up in a scant receiving blanket,
Being unwise enough to have married her I never knew when she was not acting. ‘I love you’ she would say; I heard the audiences Sigh. ‘I hate you’; I could never be sure They were still there. She was lovely. I Was only the looking-glass she made up in. I husbanded the rippling meadow Of her body. Their eyes grazed nightly upon it.
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.
...and a decrepit handful of trees. —Aleksandr Pushkin
And I matured in peace born of command, in the nursery of the infant century, and the voice of man was never dear to me, but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand. The burdock and the nettle I preferred, but best of all the silver willow tree. Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams; it lived here all my life, obligingly. I have outlived it now, and with surprise. There stands the stump; with foreign voices other willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies, and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man; Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees, And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees: The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
(from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques)
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
(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:
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew.
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment.
Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy master. Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me.
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.
'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,
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
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:
Comment form: