VI Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change; For surely now our household hearths are cold: Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile : Long labor unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot stars. VII But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) With half-dropt eyelids still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine — Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine. VIII The Lotos blooms beneath the barren peak: tone: Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown. We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foamfountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of man kind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil; Till they perish and they suffer whisper'd down in hell some, 'tis Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. Alfred, Lord Tennyson HYLAS DEAR to the sailor-kings, Bronze-bearded, steadfast-hearted, Oars' dash, when galley swings Black through the grey waves parted. O'er pebbly pools and sweet; So they call, the gold-browed kings, He left the blue profound To follow winding valleys; The dark kings waited long, Yet they call him from the shore, But Alcides sails no more Remembering the drowned child's eyes. Georgiana Goddard King ORPHEUS RPHEUS with his lute made trees OR And the mountain tops that freeze Bow themselves when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Hung their heads and then lay by. Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die. Shakespeare? FRO HYMN OF PAN ROM the forests and highlands From the river-girt islands, Where loud waves are dumb The wind in the reeds and the rushes, And the lizards below in the grass, Liquid Peneus was flowing, The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns, And the nymphs of the wood and waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves. And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love,- as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings. |