Often ornateness Goes with greatness; Oftener felicity Comes of simplicity. Talent that’s cheapest Affects singularity. Thoughts that dive deepest Rise radiant in clarity. Life is rough: Sing smoothly, O Bard. Enough, enough, To have found life hard. No record Art keeps Of her travail and throes. There is toil on the steeps,– On the summits, […]

It was a skipper of Lowestoft That trawled the northern sea, In a smack of thrice ten tons and seven, And the Britain’s Pride was she. And the waves were high to windward, And the waves were high to lee, And he said as he lost his trawl-net, “What is to be, will be.” His […]

(WITH A VOLUME OF THE AUTHOR’S POEMS SENT TO M.R.C.) Go, Verse, nor let the grass of tarrying grow Beneath thy feet iambic. Southward go O’er Thamesis his stream, nor halt until Thou reach the summit of a suburb hill To lettered fame not unfamiliar: there Crave rest and shelter of a scholiast fair, Who […]

Seabird, elemental sprite, Moulded of the sun and spray– Raven, dreary flake of night Drifting in the eye of day– What in common have ye two, Meeting ‘twixt the blue and blue? Thou to eastward carriest The keen savour of the foam,– Thou dost bear unto the west Fragrance from thy woody home, Where perchance […]

Thine were the weak, slight hands That might have taken this strong soul, and bent Its stubborn substance to thy soft intent, And bound it unresisting, with such bands As not the arm of envious heaven had rent. Thine were the calming eyes That round my pinnace could have stilled the sea, And drawn thy […]

She stands, a thousand-wintered tree, By countless morns impearled; Her broad roots coil beneath the sea, Her branches sweep the world; Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed, Clothe the remotest strand With forests from her scatterings made, New nations fostered in her shade, And linking land with land. O ye by wandering tempest sown ‘Neath […]

I saunter all about the pleasant place You made thrice pleasant, O my friends, to me; But you are gone where laughs in radiant grace That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea. To storied precincts of the southern foam, Dear birds of passage, ye have taken wing, And ah! for me, when April wafts you home, The spring […]

(DECEMBER 1, 1890) In the wild and lurid desert, in the thunder-travelled ways, ‘Neath the night that ever hurries to the dawn that still delays, There she clutches at illusions, and she seeks a phantom goal With the unattaining passion that consumes the unsleeping soul: And calamity enfolds her, like the shadow of a ban, […]

She was a lady great and splendid, I was a minstrel in her halls. A warrior like a prince attended Stayed his steed by the castle walls. Far had he fared to gaze upon her. “O rest thee now, Sir Knight,” she said. The warrior wooed, the warrior won her, In time of snowdrops they […]

And these–are these indeed the end, This grinning skull, this heavy loam? Do all green ways whereby we wend Lead but to yon ignoble home? Ah well! Thine eyes invite to bliss; Thy lips are hives of summer still. I ask not other worlds while this Proffers me all the sweets I will.

O King of kings, that watching from Thy throne Sufferest the monster of Ust-Kara’s hold, With bosom than Siberia’s wastes more cold, And hear’st the wail of captives crushed and prone, And sett’st no sign in heaven! Shall naught atone For their wild pangs whose tale is yet scarce told, Women by uttermost woe made […]

About this heart thou hast Thy chains made fast, And think’st thou I would be Therefrom set free, And forth unbound be cast? The ocean would as soon Entreat the moon Unsay the magic verse That seals him hers From silver noon to noon. She stooped her pearly head Seaward, and said: “Would’st thou I […]

Behold life builded as a goodly house And grown a mansion ruinous With winter blowing through its crumbling walls! The master paceth up and down his halls, And in the empty hours Can hear the tottering of his towers And tremor of their bases underground. And oft he starts and looks around At creaking of […]

Soon may the edict lapse, that on you lays This dire compulsion of infertile days, This hardest penal toil, reluctant rest! Meanwhile I count you eminently blest, Happy from labours heretofore well done, Happy in tasks auspiciously begun. For they are blest that have not much to rue– That have not oft mis-heard the prompter’s […]

Well he slumbers, greatly slain, Who in splendid battle dies; Deep his sleep in midmost main Pillowed upon pearl who lies. Ease, of all good gifts the best, War and wave at last decree: Love alone denies us rest, Crueller than sword or sea.

(To N.A.) So, into Cornwall you go down, And leave me loitering here in town. For me, the ebb of London’s wave, Not ocean-thunder in Cornish cave. My friends (save only one or two) Gone to the glistening marge, like you,– The opera season with blare and din Dying sublime in Lohengrin,– Houses darkened, whose […]

Yes! urban is your Muse, and owns An empire based on London stones; Yet flow’rs, as mountain violets sweet, Spring from the pavement ‘neath her feet. Of wilder birth this Muse of mine, Hill-cradled, and baptized with brine; And ’tis for her a sweet despair To watch that courtly step and air! Yet surely she, […]

Friend, in whose friendship I am twice well-starred, A debt not time may cancel is your due; For was it not your praise that earliest drew, On me obscure, that chivalrous regard, Ev’n his, who, knowing fame’s first steep how hard, With generous lips no faltering clarion blew, Bidding men hearken to a lyre by […]

ON RECEIVING FROM HIM A COPY OF “THE LIFE OF SHELLEY” First, ere I slake my hunger, let me thank The giver of the feast. For feast it is, Though of ethereal, translunary fare– His story who pre-eminently of men Seemed nourished upon starbeams and the stuff Of rainbows, and the tempest, and the foam; […]

A squalid, hideous town, where streams run black With vomit of a hundred roaring mills,– Hither occasion calls me; and ev’n here, All in the sable reek that wantonly Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn, One may at least surmise the sky still blue. Ev’n here, the myriad slaves of the machine Deem life […]