Works

Man I am and man would be, Love, merest man and nothing more.
Bid me seem no other! Eagles boast of pinions, let them soar!
I may put forth angel's plumage, once unmanned, but not before.
...

Hist, but a word, fair and soft!
Forth and be judged, Master Hugues!
Answer the question I've put you so oft:
What do you mean by your mountainous fugues?
See, we're alone in the loft,
...

I.
I wish that when you died last May,
Charles, there had died along with you
Three parts of spring's delightful things;
Ay, and, for me, the fourth part too.

II....

I

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,...

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

But you were living before that,
And you are living after,...

I.
All I believed is true!
I am able yet
All I want, to get
By a method as strange as new:
Dare I trust the same to you?

II.
If at night, when doors are shut,...

This is a spray the Bird clung to,
Making it blossom with pleasure,
Ere the high tree-top she sprang to,
Fit for her nest and her treasure.
Oh, what a hope beyond measure...

Now, don't, sir! Don't expose me!
Just this once! This was the first and only time, I'll swear,
Look at me, see, I kneel, the only time,
I swear, I ever cheated, yes, by the soul...

Frowned the Laird on the Lord: 'So, red-handed I catch thee?
Death-doomed by our Law of the Border!
We've a gallows outside and a chiel to dispatch thee:
Who trespasses, hangs: all's in order.'
...

FERRARA


That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fr' Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands....

All that I know
Of a certain star,
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue,
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,...

I.

My heart sank with our Claret-flask,
Just now, beneath the heavy sedges
That serve this Pond's black face for mask
And still at yonder broken edges
Of the hole, where up the bubbles glisten,...

All I can say is, I saw it!
The room was as bare as your hand.
I locked in the swarth little lady, I swear,
From the head to the foot of her, well, quite as bare!...

Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path, how soft to pace!
This May, what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine,...

Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,...

Still you stand, still you listen, still you smile!
Still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile,
Softening, sweetening, till sweet. and soft
Increase so round this heart of mine, that oft...

I
Query: was ever a quainter
Crotchet than this of the painter
Giacomo Pacchiarotto
Who took 'Reform' for his motto?

II
He, pupil of old Fungaio,
Is always confounded (heigho!)...

I.
The morn when first it thunders in March,
The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say.
As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
Of the villa-gate this warm March day,...

O' Lyric Love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire,
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,...

I.
All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
And strew them where Pauline may pass.
She will not turn aside? Alas!
Let them lie. Suppose they die?...