Works

Month after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Aethiopian dells,
And from the desert's ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend...

Madame, to shew the smoothnesse of my vaine,
Neither that I would haue you entertaine
The time in reading me, which you would spend
In faire discourse with some knowne honest friend,...

How shall I know, unless I go
To Cairo and Cathay,
Whether or not this blessed spot
Is blest in every way?

Now it may be, the flower for me
Is this beneath my nose;...

So proud your port, your arm so powerful,
With such a grip you grip the goddess' hair,
That one might take you, from your casual air,
For a young ruffian flinging down his trull.
...

I see you, refulgent ones,
Burning so steadily
Like big white arc lights...
There are so many of you.
I like to watch you weaving -
Altogether and with precision
Each his ray -...

Come, skilful Lupo, now, and take
Thy bice, thy umber, pink, and lake;
And let it be thy pencil's strife,
To paint a Bridgeman to the life:
Draw him as like too, as you can,...

If I lie unburied, sir,
These my relics pray inter:
'Tis religion's part to see
Stones or turfs to cover me.
One word more I had to say:
But it skills not; go your way;
He that wants a burial room...

Let there be patrons, patrons like to thee,
Brave Porter! poets ne'er will wanting be:
Fabius and Cotta, Lentulus, all live
In thee, thou man of men! who here do'st give
Not only subject-matter for our wit,...

Days undefiled by luxury or sloth,
Firm self-denial, manners grave and staid,
Rights equal, laws with cheerfulness obeyed,
Words that require no sanction from an oath,
And simple honesty a common growth,...

Lady, sweet lady, I behold thee yet,
With thy pale brow, brown eyes, and solemn air,
And billowy tresses of thy golden hair,
Which once to see, is never to forget!...

An Ode. 1685.


I.

Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest;
Whose palms, new pluck'd from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,...

What strong allurement draws, what spirit guides,
Thee, Vesper! brightening still, as if the nearer
Thou com'st to man's abode the spot grew dearer
Night after night? True is it Nature hides...

Though joy attend Thee orient at the birth
Of dawn, it cheers the lofty spirit most
To watch thy course when Day-light, fled from earth,
In the grey sky hath left his lingering Ghost,...

'Speak, O man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil!
Primal pioneer of pliocene formation,
Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum
Of volcanic tufa!

'Older than the beasts, the oldest Palaeotherium;...

"Speak, O man less recent!
Fragmentary fossil!
Primal pioneer of pliocene formation,
Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum
Of volcanic tufa!
...

What cares the rose if the buds which are its pride
Be plucked for the breast of the dead or the hands of a bride?

The mother-drift if its pebbles be dull inglorious things,...

Let thy speech be to thee what the body is to the loving;
Beings it only can part, beings it only can join.

Bard of the Fleece, whose skilful genius made
That work a living landscape fair and bright;
Nor hallowed less with musical delight
Than those soft scenes through which thy childhood strayed,...

My dear Poet Laureate, -
Do not, I implore you,
Be perturbed.
It is not my purpose to harp
Upon old strings,
Or to express the smallest satisfaction
Either with you as an official personage...

Himself I read beneath the words he writes ...
I may come back and sing again. - RYAN.


I.

This Bard's to me a whole-souled man
In honesty and might,
For when he sees Wrong in the van...