Thin summer rain on grass and bush and hedge,
    Reddening the road and deepening the green
On wide, blurred lawn, and in close-tangled sedge;
    Veiling in gray the landscape stretched between
    These low broad meadows and the pale hills seen
But dimly on the far horizon's edge.


In these transparent-clouded, gentle skies,
    Wherethrough the moist beams of the soft June sun
Might any moment break, no sorrow lies,
    No note of grief in swollen brooks that run,
    No hint of woe in this subdued, calm tone
Of all the prospect unto dreamy eyes.


Only a tender, unnamed half-regret
    For the lost beauty of the gracious morn;
A yearning aspiration, fainter yet,
    For brighter suns in joyous days unborn,
    Now while brief showers ...

I dread that street its haggard face
I have not seen for eight long years;
A mother’s curse is on the place,
(There’s blood, my reader, in her tears).
No child of man shall ever track,
Through filthy dust, the singer’s feet
A fierce old memory drags me back;
I hate its name I dread that street.

Upon the lap of green, sweet lands,
Whose months are like your English Mays,
I try to hide in Lethe’s sands
The bitter, old Bohemian days.
But sorrow speaks in singing leaf,
And trouble talketh in the tide;
The skirts of a stupendous grief
Are trailing ever at my side.

I will not say who suffered there,
’Tis best the name aloof to keep,
Because the world is very fair
Its light should sing the dark to sleep.
But, let me whisper, in that st...

I seek no more to bridge the gulf that lies
Betwixt our separate ways;
For vainly my heart prays,
Hope droops her head and dies;
I see the sad, tired answer in your eyes.

I did not heed, and yet the stars were clear;
Dreaming that love could mate
Lives grown so separate;--
But at the best, my dear,
I see we should not have been very near.

I knew the end before the end was nigh:
The stars have grown so plain;
Vainly I sigh, in vain
For things that come to some,
But unto you and me will never come.

There was a youth around whose early way
White angels hung in converse and sweet choir,
Teaching in summer clouds his thought to stray, -
In cloud and far horizon to desire.
His life was nursed in beauty, like the stream
Born of clear showers and the mountain dew,
Close under snow-clad summits where they gleam
Forever pure against heaven's orient blue.
Within the city's shades he walked at last.
Faint and more faint in sad recessional
Down the dim corridors of Time outworn,
A chorus ebbed from that forsaken past,
A hymn of glories fled beyond recall
With the lost heights and splendor of life's morn.

The white moth-mullein brushed its slim
Cool, faery flowers against his knee;
In places where the way lay dim
The branches, arching suddenly,
Made tomblike mystery for him.

The wild-rose and the elder, drenched
With rain, made pale a misty place,
From which, as from a ghost, he blenched;
He walking with averted face,
And lips in desolation clenched.

For far within the forest, where
Weird shadows stood like phantom men,
And where the ground-hog dug its lair,
The she-fox whelped and had her den,
The thing kept calling, buried there.

One dead trunk, like a ruined tower,
Dark-green with toppling trailers, shoved
Its wild wreck o'er the bush; one bower
Looked like a dead man, capped and gloved,
The one who haunted him each hour.

Illustration Of A Picture

They bid me strike the idle strings,
As if my summer days
Had shaken sunbeams from their wings
To warm my autumn lays;
They bring to me their painted urn,
As if it were not time
To lift my gauntlet and to spurn
The lists of boyish rhyme;
And were it not that I have still
Some weakness in my heart
That clings around my stronger will
And pleads for gentler art,
Perchance I had not turned away
The thoughts grown tame with toil,
To cheat this lone and pallid ray,
That wastes the midnight oil.

Alas! with every year I feel
Some roses leave my brow;
Too young for wisdom's tardy seal,
Too old for garlands now.
Yet, while the dewy breath of spring
Steals o'er the tingling air,
And spreads and fans...

Amid my books I lived the hurrying years,
Disdaining kinship with my fellow man;
Alike to me were human smiles and tears,
I cared not whither Earth's great life-stream ran,
Till as I knelt before my mouldered shrine,
God made me look into a woman's eyes;
And I, who thought all earthly wisdom mine,
Knew in a moment that the eternal skies
Were measured but in inches, to the quest
That lay before me in that mystic gaze.
"Surely I have been errant: it is best
That I should tread, with men their human ways."
God took the teacher, ere the task was learned,
And to my lonely books again I turned.

There came a crowder to the Mermaid Inn,
    One dark May night,
Fiddling a tune that quelled our motley din,
    With quaint delight,
It haunts me yet, as old lost airs will do,
    A phantom strain:
Look for me once, lest I should look for you,
    And look in vain.

In that old wood, where ghosts of lovers walk,
    At fall of day,
Gleaning such fragments of their ancient talk
    As poor ghosts may,
From leaves that brushed their faces, wet with dew,
    Or tears, or rain,...
Look for me once, lest I should look for you,
    And look in vain.

Have we not seen them--pale forgotten shades
    That do return,
Groping for those dim paths, those fragrant glades,
    Those nooks of fern,
Only to find that, of the may ...

Now when dun Night her shadowy veil has spread,
See want and infamy, as forth they come,
Lead their wan daughter from her branded home,
To woo the stranger for unhallow'd bread.
Poor outcast! o'er thy sickly-tinted cheek
And half-clad form, what havoc want hath made;
And the sweet lustre of thine eye doth fade,
And all thy soul's sad sorrow seems to speak.
O! miserable state! compell'd to wear
The wooing smile, as on thy aching breast
Some wretch reclines, who feeling ne'er possess'd;
Thy poor heart bursting with the stifled tear!
Oh! GOD OF MERCY! bid her woes subside,
And be to her a friend, who hath no friend beside.

Why, mourner, do you mourn, nor see
The heavenly Earth's felicity?

I mourn for him, my Dearest, lost,
Who lived a frail life at my cost.

A grief like yours how many have known!

Were that a balm to ease my own!
Or rather might I not accuse
The Hand that does not even choose,
But, taking blindly, took my best,
And as indifferently takes the rest ...
Like mine? Is there denied to me
Even Sorrow's singularity?

Walking, snow falling, it is possible
to focus at various distances
in turn on separate flakes, sharply engage
the attention at several spatial points:
the nearer cold and more uncomfortable,
the farther distanced and almost pleasing.

Living, time passing, it is preferable
to focus the memory in turn upon
the more distant retrospects in order
that the present mind may retain its peace.

Yet knowing that seeing and remembering
are both of course personal illusions.

In Imitation of An Old English Poem


My wayward fate I needs must plain,
Though bootless be the theme;
I loved, and was beloved again,
Yet all was but a dream:
For, a her love was quickly got,
So it was quickly gone;
No more I'll bask in flame so hot,
But coldly dwell alone.

Not maid more bright than maid was e'er
My fancy shall beguile,
By flattering word, or feigned tear,
By gesture, look, or smile:
No more I'll call the shaft fair shot,
Till it has fairly flown,
Nor scorch me at a flame so hot;
I'll rather freeze alone.

Each ambush'd Cupid I'll defy,
In cheek, or chin, or brow,
And deem the glance of woman's eye
As weak as woman's vow:
I'll lightly hold the lady's heart,
That is but lightly won;

While forced to dwell apart from thy dear face,
    Love, robed like sorrow, led me by the hand
    And taught my doubting heart to understand
That which has puzzled all the human race.
Full many a sage has questioned where in space
    Those counter worlds were? where the mystic strand
    That separates them?    I have found each land,
And Hell is vast, and Heaven a narrow space.

In the small compass of thy clasping arms,
    In reach and sight of thy dear lips and eyes,
    There, there for me the joy of Heaven lies.
Outside, lo! chaos, terrors' wild alarms,
And all the desolation fierce and fell
Of void and aching nothingness, makes Hell.

Sad-hearted spirit of the solitudes,
Who comest through the ruin-wedded woods!
Gray-gowned with fog, gold-girdled with the gloom
Of tawny twilights; burdened with perfume
Of rain-wet uplands, chilly with the mist;
And all the beauty of the fire-kissed
Cold forests crimsoning thy indolent way,
Odorous of death and drowsy with decay.
I think of thee as seated 'mid the showers
Of languid leaves that cover up the flowers, -
The little flower-sisterhoods, whom June
Once gave wild sweetness to, as to a tune
A singer gives her soul's wild melody, -
Watching the squirrel store his granary.
Or, 'mid old orchards I have pictured thee:
Thy hair's profusion blown about thy back;
One lovely shoulder bathed with gipsy black;
Upon thy palm one nestling cheek, and sweet<...

        Now would I be in that removèd place
        Where the dim sunlight hardly comes at all
        And branches of the young trees interlace
        And long swathes of the brambles twine and fall;
        A space between the hedgerow and a road
        Not trod by foot of any known to me,
        Where now and then a cart with scented load
    Goes sleepy down the lane with creaking axle-tree.

        And there I'd lie upon the tumbled leaves,
        Watching a square of the all else hidden sky,
        And made such songs a drowsy mind believes
        To be most perfect music.    So would I
    Keep my face heavenwards and bless eternity,
        Wherein my heart could be as glad as this
        And lazily I'd bid all men come hither
        And in m...

Dawn, midnight, noonday? What are times to thee
Man's Grief art thou, that moanest with the light,
And starest dumb at evening, and at night
Dost wake and dream and slumber fitfully!
Thou art Distress, that cannot cry aloud.
That cannot weep, that cannot stoop to tear
One fold of all her garment, but with air
Supremely brooding waits the final shroud!

Dust, long ago, the princes of this place;
Forgot the civic losses which in thee
Great Angelo lamented; but thy face
Proclaims the master's immortality!
So sit thee, marble Grief! this very day
How burns the art when long the hand is clay!

Little All-Aloney's feet
Pitter-patter in the hall,
And his mother runs to meet
And to kiss her toddling sweet,
Ere perchance he fall.
He is, oh, so weak and small!
Yet what danger shall he fear
When his mother hovereth near,
And he hears her cheering call:
"All-Aloney"?

Little All-Aloney's face
It is all aglow with glee,
As around that romping-place
At a terrifying pace
Lungeth, plungeth he!
And that hero seems to be
All unconscious of our cheers -
Only one dear voice he hears
Calling reassuringly:
"All-Aloney!"

Though his legs bend with their load,
Though his feet they seem so small
That you cannot help forebode
Some disastrous episode
In that noisy hall,
Neither threatening bump nor fall
Little A...

There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake—that all heart’s ache have known,
And given to others all heart’s ache,
From meagre girlhood’s putting on
Burdensome beauty—for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.

Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, ‘Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.’

Vagu...