Can we not force from widow'd poetry, Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust, Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust, Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour, Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day? Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense Through all our language, both the words and sense? 'Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain And sober Christian precepts still retain, Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame, Grave homilies and lectures, but the flame Of thy brave soul (that shot such heat and light
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum. In mid-September The entering boys, identified by hats, Wander in a maze of mannered brick Where boxwood and magnolia brood And columns with imperious stance Like rows of ante-bellum girls Eye them, outlanders.
Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread; For Love is dead— All love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdain; Worth, as nought worth, rejected, And Faith fair scorn doth gain. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy,
A poet!—He hath put his heart to school, Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff Which art hath lodged within his hand—must laugh By precept only, and shed tears by rule. Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff, And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool, In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool Have killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph. How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold; And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree Comes not by casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality.
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's, Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays; The world's whole sap is sunk; The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh, Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express
Proem. Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie, Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime, And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time. So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence, The sound thereof raps every human sense That men account it no impiety To say thou wert a fleshly Deity. Thousands bring off’rings (though out of date) Thy world of honours to accumulate. ‘Mongst hundred Hecatombs of roaring Verse, ‘Mine bleating stands before thy royal Hearse. Thou never didst, nor canst thou now disdain, T’ accept the tribute of a loyal Brain.
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began. Allow, Therefore, that in the planetary scene Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r, Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Rome, 15— Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? Nephews—sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well— She, men would have to be your mother once,
I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor and the French pinball addicts. I am leading a quiet life on lower East Broadway. I am an American.
Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame, Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee; Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history; If thou praise not, all other praise is shame. Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame A nest for my young praise in laurel tree: In truth I sweare, I wish not there should be Graved in mine epitaph a Poet’s name: Nay if I would, could I just title make, That any laud to me thereof should grow, Without my plumes from others’ wings I take. For nothing from my wit or will doth flow, Since all my words thy beauty doth endite, And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.
You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be your irreversible time is that river in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read his brevity? A marble slab is saved for you, one you won’t read, already graved with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
New England. Alas, dear Mother, fairest Queen and best, With honour, wealth, and peace happy and blest, What ails thee hang thy head, and cross thine arms, And sit i’ the dust to sigh these sad alarms? What deluge of new woes thus over-whelm The glories of thy ever famous Realm? What means this wailing tone, this mournful guise? Ah, tell thy Daughter; she may sympathize.
Old England. Art ignorant indeed of these my woes, Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose, And must my self dissect my tatter’d state, Which Amazed Christendom stands wondering at?
This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms.
Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, When the death-angel touches those swift keys! What loud lament and dismal Miserere Will mingle with their awful symphonies!
I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus, The cries of agony, the endless groan, Which, through the ages that have gone before us, In long reverberations reach our own.
It may be through some foreign grace, And unfamiliar charm of face; It may be that across the foam Which bore her from her childhood’s home, By some strange spell, my Katie brought, Along with English creeds and thought— Entangled in her golden hair— Some English sunshine, warmth, and air!
Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances! Honored and blessed be the ever-green Pine! Long may the tree, in his banner that glances, Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line! Heaven sent it happy dew, Earth lend it sap anew, Gayly to bourgeon and broadly to grow, While every Highland glen Sends our shout back again, “Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!”
Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain, Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade; When the whirlwind has stripped every leaf on the mountain, The more shall Clan-Alpine exult in her shade.
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