Sestet - Sent To A Friend With A Volume Of Tennyson

Wouldst know the clash of knightly steel on steel?
Or list the throstle singing loud and clear?
Or walk at twilight by some haunted mere
In Surrey; or in throbbing London feel
Life's pulse at highest--hark, the minster's peal! . . .
Turn but the page, that various world is here!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic Monthly. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, much of his writing was inspired by his experiences in the city. He wrote volumes of poetry, novels, and short stories. Aldrich's semi-autobiographical book, "The Story of a Bad Boy," is considered an early example of the "bad boy" genre in American literature.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thalia

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Simple Poetry

Memory

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Simple Poetry

At The Funeral Of A Minor Poet

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Simple Poetry

Guilielmus Rex

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Tennyson

I

Shakespeare and Milton--what third blazoned name
Shall lips of after-ages link to these?
His who, beside the wild encircling seas,
Was England's voice, her voice with one acclaim,
For threescore years; whose word of praise was fame,
Whose scorn gave pause to man's iniquities.


II

What strain was his in that Crimean war?
A bugle-call in battle; a low breath,
Plaintive and sweet, above the fields of death!
So year by year the music rolled afar,
From Euxine wastes to flowery Kandahar,
Bearing the laurel or the cypress wreath.


III

Others shall have their little space of time,
Their proper niche and bust, then fade away
Into the darkness, poets of a day;
But thou, O builder of enduring rhyme,
Thou shalt not ...

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Friends Beyond

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!

"Gone," I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads;
Yet at mothy curfew-tide,
And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,

They've a way of whispering to me fellow-wight who yet abide -
In the muted, measured note
Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide:

"We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane to antidote,
Unsuccesses to success,
- Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free of thought.

"No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial stress;
Chill detraction stirs no sigh;
Fear of death has...

Thomas Hardy

In Westminster Abbey

"The Southern Transept, hardly known by any other name but Poet's Corner."

DEAN STANLEY.

Tread softly here; the sacredest of tombs
Are those that hold your Poets.    Kings and queens
Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.
Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!
But he who from the darkling mass of men
Is on the wing of heavenly thought upborne
To finer ether, and becomes a voice
For all the voiceless, God anointed him:
His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.

Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.
Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns
Lies richer dust than ever nature hid
Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,
Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand--
The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.
How vain ...

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Tis He Whose Yester-Evening's High Disdain

'Tis He whose yester-evening's high disdain
Beat back the roaring storm, but how subdued
His day-break note, a sad vicissitude!
Does the hour's drowsy weight his glee restrain?
Or, like the nightingale, her joyous vein
Pleased to renounce, does this dear Thrush attune
His voice to suit the temper of yon Moon
Doubly depressed, setting, and in her wane?
Rise, tardy Sun! and let the Songster prove
(The balance trembling between night and morn
No longer) with what ecstasy upborne
He can pour forth his spirit. In heaven above,
And earth below, they best can serve true gladness
Who meet most feelingly the calls of sadness.

William Wordsworth

What Shall I Sing Thee?

TO ----.


What shall I sing thee? Shall I tell
Of that bright hour, remembered well
As tho' it shone but yesterday,

When loitering idly in the ray
Of a spring sun I heard o'er-head,
My name as by some spirit said,
And, looking up, saw two bright eyes
    Above me from a casement shine,
Dazzling my mind with such surprise
    As they, who sail beyond the Line,
Feel when new stars above them rise;--
And it was thine, the voice that spoke,
    Like Ariel's, in the mid-air then;
And thine the eye whose lustre broke--
    Never to be forgot again!

What shall I sing thee? Shall I weave
A song of that sweet summer-eve,
(Summer, of which the sunniest part
Was that we, each, had in the heart,)
When thou and I, and one like the...

Thomas Moore

To Alfred Tennyson--1883

Familiar with thy melody,
    We go debating of its power,
    As churls, who hear it hour by hour,
Contemn the skylark's minstrelsy--

As shepherds on a Highland lea
    Think lightly of the heather flower
    Which makes the moorland's purple dower,
As far away as eye can see.

Let churl or shepherd change his sky,
    And labour in the city dark,
            Where there is neither air nor room--
How often will the exile sigh
    To hear again the unwearied lark,
            And see the heather's lavish bloom!

Robert Fuller Murray