Works

By Moscow self-devoted to a blaze
Of dreadful sacrifice, by Russian blood
Lavished in fight with desperate hardihood;
The unfeeling Elements no claim shall raise
To rob our Human-nature of just praise...

Sweetheart, be my sweetheart
When birds are on the wing,
When bee and bud and babbling flood
Bespeak the birth of spring,
Come, sweetheart, be my sweetheart
And wear this posy-ring!
...

By night when others soundly slept
And hath at once both ease and Rest,
My waking eyes were open kept
And so to lie I found it best.

I sought him whom my Soul did Love,...

I sent my love a parcel
In the days when we were young,
Or e'er by care and trouble
Our heart-strings had been wrung.
By parcels post I sent it,
What 'twas I do not know,...

Poets they do pursue each theme,
Under a gentle head of steam,
Save one who needed fierce fire on,
The brilliant, pasionate Byron.
His child Harold's pilgrimage,
Forever will the world engage;...

While genius endows the sons of men
With eloquence, or with poetic pen,
It leaves them still the frailties of our frame,
It does not curb, but fans th' unrighteous flame....

He was a god descended from the skies
To fight the fight of Freedom o'er a grave,
And consecrate a hope he could not save;
For he was weak withal, and foolish-wise....

Poet:

"Why this fever why this sighing?
Why this restless longing dying
For a something dreamy something,
Undefined, and yet defying
All the pride and power of manhood?
...

By rugged ways and thro' the night
We struggle blindly toward the light;
And groping, stumbling, ever pray
For sight of long delaying day.
The cruel thorns beside the road...

By that Lake, whose gloomy shore
Sky-lark never warbles o'er,[2]
Where the cliff hangs high and steep,
Young St. Kevin stole to sleep.
"Here, at least," he calmly said,
"Woman ne'er shall find my bed."...

A Far bell tinkles in the hollow,
And heart and soul are fain to follow:
Gone is the rose and gone the swallow:
Autumn is here.

The wild geese draw at dusk their harrow...

The oleander on the wall
Grows crimson in the dawning light,
Though the grey shadows of the night
Lie yet on Florence like a pall.

The dew is bright upon the hill,...

If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,

If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,...

Not far from Mellstock - so tradition saith -
Where barrows, bulging as they bosoms were
Of Multimammia stretched supinely there,
Catch night and noon the tempest's wanton breath,
...

By the bivouac's fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow;--but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline,...

In a far-away glen of the hills,
Where the bird of the night is at rest,
Shut in from the thunder that fills
The fog-hidden caves of the west
In a sound of the leaf, and the lute...

The baby Summer lies asleep and dreaming--
Dreaming and blooming like a guarded rose;
And March, a kindly nurse, though rude of seeming,
Is watching by the cradle hung with snows.
...

Close her eyes: she must not peep!
Let her little puds go slack;
Slide away far into sleep:
Sis will watch till she comes back!

Mother's knitting at the door,
Waiting till the kettle sings;...

I

"O Lord, why grievest Thou? -
Since Life has ceased to be
Upon this globe, now cold
As lunar land and sea,
And humankind, and fowl, and fur
Are gone eternally,...

We who are lovers sit by the fire,
Cradled warm 'twixt thought and will,
Sit and drowse like sleeping dogs
In the equipoise of all desire,
Sit and listen to the still...