Sleep, kinsman thou to death and tranceAnd madness, thou hast forged at lastA night-long Present of the PastIn which we went thro’ summer France. Hadst thou such credit with the soul?Then bring an opiate trebly strong,Drug down the blindfold sense of wrongThat so my pleasure may be whole; While now we talk as once we […]

I cannot see the features right,When on the gloom I strive to paintThe face I know; the hues are faintAnd mix with hollow masks of night; Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,A hand that points, and palled shapesIn shadowy thoroughfares of thought; And crowds that stream from yawning doors,And shoals […]

I dream’d there would be Spring no more,That Nature’s ancient power was lost:The streets were black with smoke and frost,They chatter’d trifles at the door: I wander’d from the noisy town,I found a wood with thorny boughs:I took the thorns to bind my brows,I wore them like a civic crown: I met with scoffs, I […]

When in the down I sink my head,Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath;Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death,Nor can I dream of thee as dead: I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn,When all our path was fresh with dew,And all the bugle breezes blewReveillée to the breaking morn. But what is this? I turn about,I […]

When on my bed the moonlight falls,I know that in thy place of restBy that broad water of the west,There comes a glory on the walls; Thy marble bright in dark appears,As slowly steals a silver flameAlong the letters of thy name,And o’er the number of thy years. The mystic glory swims away;From off my […]

You thought my heart too far diseased;You wonder when my fancies playTo find me gay among the gay,Like one with any trifle pleased. The shade by which my life was crost,Which makes a desert in the mind,Has made me kindly with my kind,And like to him whose sight is lost; Whose feet are guided thro’ […]

Sweet soul, do with me as thou wilt;I lull a fancy trouble-tostWith `Love’s too precious to be lost,A little grain shall not be spilt.’ And in that solace can I sing,Till out of painful phases wroughtThere flutters up a happy thought,Self-balanced on a lightsome wing: Since we deserved the name of friends,And thine effect so […]

Dost thou look back on what hath been,As some divinely gifted man,Whose life in low estate beganAnd on a simple village green; Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,And grasps the skirts of happy chance,And breasts the blows of circumstance,And grapples with his evil star; Who makes by force his merit knownAnd lives to clutch the […]

Yet pity for a horse o’er-driven,And love in which my hound has part,Can hang no weight upon my heartIn its assumptions up to heaven; And I am so much more than these,As thou, perchance, art more than I,And yet I spare them sympathy,And I would set their pains at ease. So mayst thou watch me […]

Tho’ if an eye that’s downward castCould make thee somewhat blench or fail,Then be my love an idle tale, And fading legend of the past; And thou, as one that once declined,When he was little more than boy,On some unworthy heart with joy,But lives to wed an equal mind; And breathes a novel world, the […]