Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint Stands nearer than God stands to our distress, And one small candle shines, but not so faint As the far lights of everlastingness, I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day Where Christ is hanging, rather pray To something more like my own clay, Not too divine;
That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”
I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know
The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again.
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.
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant. Lean back, and get some minutes' peace; Let your head lean Back to the shoulder with its fleece Of locks, Faustine.
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses The steep square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, To the low last edge of the long lone land. If a step should sound or a word be spoken, Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand? So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless, Through branches and briars if a man make way,
I Beyond the hollow sunset, ere a star Take heart in heaven from eastward, while the west, Fulfilled of watery resonance and rest, Is as a port with clouds for harbour bar To fold the fleet in of the winds from far That stir no plume now of the bland sea's breast:
II Above the soft sweep of the breathless bay Southwestward, far past flight of night and day, Lower than the sunken sunset sinks, and higher Than dawn can freak the front of heaven with fire, My thought with eyes and wings made wide makes way To find the place of souls that I desire.
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.
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