Ben Jonson.
1573–1637

SEE the Chariot at hand here of Love,

  Wherein my Lady rideth!

Each that draws is a swan or a dove,

  And well the car Love guideth.

As she goes, all hearts do duty

          Unto her beauty;

And enamour’d do wish, so they might

          But enjoy such a sight,

That they still were to run by her side,

Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.

 

Do but look on her eyes, they do light

  All that Love’s world compriseth!

Do but look on her hair, it is bright

  As Love’s star when it riseth!

Do but mark, her forehead’s smoother

          Than words that soothe her;

And from her arch’d brows such a grace

          Sheds itself through the face,

As alone there triumphs to the life

All the gain, all the good, of the elements’ strife.

 

Have you seen but a bright lily grow

  Before rude hands have touch’d it?

Have you mark’d but the fall of the snow

  Before the soil hath smutch’d it?

Have you felt the wool of beaver,

          Or swan’s down ever?

Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the brier,

          Or the nard in the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!

Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1803–1882

IT fell in the ancient periods

  Which the brooding soul surveys,

Or ever the wild Time coin’d itself

  Into calendar months and days.

 

This was the lapse of Uriel,

Which in Paradise befell.

Once, among the Pleiads walking,

Sayd overheard the young gods talking;

And the treason, too long pent,

To his ears was evident.

The young deities discuss’d

Laws of form, and metre just,

Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,

What subsisteth, and what seems.

One, with low tones that decide,

And doubt and reverend use defied,

With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirr’d the devils everywhere,

Gave his sentiment divine

Against the being of a line.

‘Line in nature is not found;

Unit and universe are round;

In vain produced, all rays return;

Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’

As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,

A shudder ran around the sky;

The stern old war-gods shook their heads;

The seraphs frown’d from myrtle-beds;

Seem’d to the holy festival

The rash word boded ill to all;

The balance-beam of Fate was bent;

The bounds of good and ill were rent;

Strong Hades could not keep his own,

But all slid to confusion.

 

A sad self-knowledge withering fell

On the beauty of Uriel;

In heaven once eminent, the god

Withdrew that hour into his cloud;

Whether doom’d to long gyration

In the sea of generation,

Or by knowledge grown too bright

To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

Straightway a forgetting wind

Stole over the celestial kind,

And their lips the secret kept,

If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But, now and then, truth-speaking things

Shamed the angels’ veiling wings;

And, shrilling from the solar course,

Or from fruit of chemic force,

Procession of a soul in matter,

Or the speeding change of water,

Or out of the good of evil born,

Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,

And a blush tinged the upper sky,

And the gods shook, they knew not why.

Thomas Gray.
1716–1771

TWAS on a lofty vase’s side,

Where China’s gayest art had dyed

  The azure flowers that blow;

Demurest of the tabby kind,

The pensive Selima reclined,

  Gazed on the lake below.

 

Her conscious tail her joy declared;

The fair round face, the snowy beard,

  The velvet of her paws,

Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,

Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,

  She saw; and purr’d applause.

 

Still had she gazed; but ‘midst the tide

Two angel forms were seen to glide,

  The Genii of the stream:

Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue

Thro’ richest purple to the view

  Betray’d a golden gleam.

 

The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:

A whisker first and then a claw,

  With many an ardent wish,

She stretch’d in vain to reach the prize.

What female heart can gold despise?

What Cat ’s averse to fish?

 

Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent

Again she stretch’d, again she bent,

  Nor knew the gulf between.

(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.)

The slipp’ry verge her feet beguiled,

  She tumbled headlong in.

 

Eight times emerging from the flood

She mew’d to ev’ry wat’ry god,

  Some speedy aid to send.

No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr’d:

Nor cruel
Tom, norSusan heard.

  A Fav’rite has no friend!

 

From hence, ye Beauties, undeceived,

Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,

  And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes

And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;

   Nor all that glisters, gold.

Alfred Tennyson, Lord Tennyson.
1809 – 1892

COME into the garden, Maud,

  For the black bat, Night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud,

  I am here at the gate alone;

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,

  And the musk of the roses blown.

 

For a breeze of morning moves,

  And the planet of Love is on high,

Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

  On a bed of daffodil sky,

To faint in the light of the sun she loves,

  To faint in his light, and to die.

 

All night have the roses heard

  The flute, violin, bassoon;

All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d

  To the dancers dancing in tune;

Till a silence fell with the waking bird,

  And a hush with the setting moon.

 

I said to the lily, ‘There is but one

  With whom she has heart to be gay.

When will the dancers leave her alone?

  She is weary of dance and play.’

Now half to the setting moon are gone,

  And half to the rising day;

Low on the sand and loud on the stone

  The last wheel echoes away.

 

I said to the rose, ‘The brief night goes

  In babble and revel and wine.

O young lord-lover, what sighs are those

  For one that will never be thine?

But mine, but mine,’ so I sware to the rose,

  ‘For ever and ever, mine.’

 

And the soul of the rose went into my blood,

  As the music clash’d in the hall;

And long by the garden lake I stood,

  For I heard your rivulet fall

From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,

  Our wood, that is dearer than all;

 

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet

  That whenever a March-wind sighs

He sets the jewel-print of your feet

  In violets blue as your eyes,

To the woody hollows in which we meet

  And the valleys of Paradise.

 

The slender acacia would not shake

  One long milk-bloom on the tree;

The white lake-blossom fell into the lake,

  As the pimpernel dozed on the lea;

But the rose was awake all night for your sake,

  Knowing your promise to me;

The lilies and roses were all awake,

  They sigh’d for the dawn and thee.

 

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

  Come hither, the dances are done,

In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

  Queen lily and rose in one;

Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls.

  To the flowers, and be their sun.

 

There has fallen a splendid tear

  From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

  She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’

  And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

  And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

 

She is coming, my own, my sweet;

  Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

  Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

  Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

  And blossom in purple and red.

John Donne.
1573–1631

WHOEVER comes to shroud me, do not harm

        Nor question much

That subtle wreath of hair about mine arm;

The mystery, the sign you must not touch,

      For ’tis my outward soul,

Viceroy to that which, unto heav’n being gone,

      Will leave this to control

And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.

 

For if the sinewy thread my brain lets fall

        Through every part

Can tie those parts, and make me one of all;

Those hairs, which upward grew, and strength and art

      Have from a better brain,

Can better do ‘t: except she meant that I

      By this should know my pain,

As prisoners then are manacled, when they’re condemn’d to die.

 

Whate’er she meant by ‘t, bury it with me,

        For since I am

Love’s martyr, it might breed idolatry

If into other hands these reliques came.

      As ’twas humility

T’ afford to it all that a soul can do,

      So ’tis some bravery

That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.

Emily Brontë.
1818 – 1848

STILL let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear

Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;

A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,

And offers for short life, eternal liberty.

 

He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,

With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:

Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,

And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

 

Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,

When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears:

When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,

I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.

 

But first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;

The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.

Mute music soothes my breast—unutter’d harmony

That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

 

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;

Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found,

Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.

 

O dreadful is the check—intense the agony—

When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;

When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again—

The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

 

Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;

The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;

And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,

If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.

 

John Keats.
1795–1821

BRIGHT Star, would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priest-like task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

  Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

  And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

William Blake
1757 –1827

Cruelty has a human heart,

   And Jealousy a human face;

 Terror the human form divine,

   And Secresy the human dress.

 

 The human dress is forged iron,

   The human form a fiery forge,

 The human face a furnace sealed,

   The human heart its hungry gorge.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792–1822

   I

 

O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being

   Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

 

   Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou

   Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

 

The wingàd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

   Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

 

   Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

   With living hues and odours plain and hill;

 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

 

  II

 

Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,

   Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,

 

   Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

   Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

 

Of some fierce Mæand, even from the dim verge

   Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

 

   Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

   Vaulted with all thy congregated might

 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!

 

  III

 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

   The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,

 

   Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

   Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

 

All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers

   So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

 

   Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

   The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

 

  IV

 

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

   If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

 

   The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even

   I were as in my boyhood, and could be

 

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

   As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem’d a vision—I would ne’er have striven

 

   As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

   I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

 

A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d

One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

 

  V

 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

   What if my leaves are falling like its own?

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

 

   Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

   My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,

   Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

 

   Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

   Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?