As to a child, I talked my heart asleep With empty promise of the coming day, And it slept rather for my words made sleep Than from a thought of what their sense did say....
Like to a ship that storms urge on its course, By its own trials our soul is surer made. The very things that make the voyage worse Do make it better; its peril is its aid....
As the lone, frighted user of a night-road Suddenly turns round, nothing to detect, Yet on his fear's sense keepeth still the load Of that brink-nothing he doth but suspect;...
When I should be asleep to mine own voice In telling thee how much thy love's my dream, I find me listening to myself, the noise Of my words othered in my hearing them....
We are born at sunset and we die ere morn, And the whole darkness of the world we know, How can we guess its truth, to darkness born, The obscure consequence of absent glow?...
Beauty and love let no one separate, Whom exact Nature did to each other fit, Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate And to Love beauty as true colour of it. Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair,...
Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving, Who with feared longing half would know, dissembling With what he'd wish proved what he fears soon proving,...
We never joy enjoy to that full point Regret doth wish joy had enjoy'd been, Nor have the strength regret to disappoint Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien. Yet joy was joy when it enjoy'd was...
My love, and not I, is the egoist. My love for thee loves itself more than thee; Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist, And makes me live that it may feed on me. In the country of bridges the bridge is...
Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night, In one black mystery two void mysteries blends; The stray stars, whose innumerable light Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;...
When in the widening circle of rebirth To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come, And try again the unremembered earth With the old sadness for the immortal home,...
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing. Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes, Still suggests form as aught whose proper being Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes....
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man, Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older, Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan, Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder....
Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day, When clouds are one cloud till the horizon, Our thinking senses deem the sun away And say ''tis sunless' and 'there is no sun';...
Something in me was born before the stars And saw the sun begin from far away. Our yellow, local day on its wont jars, For it hath communed with an absolute day....
My weary life, that lives unsatisfied On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this, To whom the power to will hath been denied And the will to renounce doth also miss;...
We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling, And do but compel Fate aside or back By Fate's own immanence in the compelling....
The world is woven all of dream and error And but one sureness in our truth may lie-- That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror We know it not by knowing it thereby....
How yesterday is long ago! The past Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day, And bygone things, the first-lived as the last, In irreparable sameness far away. How the to-be is infinitely ever...
The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream. Surely reality cannot be this! Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!...