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;
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,
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Duncan Gray came here to woo, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! On blythe Yule night when we were fou, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Maggie coost her head fu high, Look'd asklent and unco skeigh, Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh; Ha, ha, the wooin o't!
Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan sigh'd baith out and in, Grat his een baith bleer't and blin',
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
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,
You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth, You have said my name as a prayer. Here where trees are planted by the water I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret, And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,
My mother remembers the agony of her womb And long years that seemed to promise more than this. She says, “You do not love me,
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks:
At supper time an ondine’s narrow feet made dark tracks on the hearth. Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire’s heat, but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold. The sandy hem of her skirt dripped on the floor. She sat there with a silvered cedar knot for a low stool; and I sat opposite, my lips and eyelids hot
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,
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness, Like the flight of a moth which, had it known, Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety, The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride, The time when I was among their adherents
(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
All the kids came rumbling down the wood tenement Shaky stairs, sneakers slapping against the worn Tin tread edges, downhall came Pepo, Chino, Cojo, Curly bursting from the door like shells exploding Singing "I'm a Rican Doodle Dandy" and "What shall We be today, Doctors or Junkies, Soldiers or Winos?"
Pepo put a milk crate on a Spanish Harlem johnny pump And drops opened like paratroopers carrying war news.
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honor, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face Contemplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Oh, what a lantern, what a lamp of light Is thy pure word to me To clear my paths and guide my goings right! I swore and swear again, I of the statues will observer be, Thou justly dost ordain.
The heavy weights of grief oppress me sore: Lord, raise me by the word, As thou to me didst promise heretofore. And this unforced praise I for an off’ring bring, accept, O Lord, And show to me thy ways.
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