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Romantic Poetry - 68

The Cloud Confines by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The day is dark and the night
To him that would search their heart;
No lips of cloud that will part
Nor morning song in the light:
Only, gazing alone,
To him wild shadows are shown,
Deep under deep unknown
And height above unknown height.
Still we say as we go,--
'Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.'

The Past is over and fled;
Nam'd new, we name it the old;
Thereof some tale hath been told,
But no word comes from the dead;
Whether at all they be,
Or whether as bond or free,
Or whether they too were we,
Or by what spell they have sped.
Still we say as we go,--
'Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.'

What of the heart of hate
That beats in thy breast, O Time?--
Red strife from the furthest prime,
And anguish of fierce debate;
War that shatters her slain,
And peace that grinds them as grain,
And eyes fix'd ever in vain
On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
Still we say as we go,--
'Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.'

What of the heart of love
That bleeds in thy breast, O Man?--
Thy kisses snatch'd 'neath the ban
Of fangs that mock them above;
Thy bells prolong'd unto knells,
Thy hope that a breath dispels,
Thy bitter forlorn farewells
And the empty echoes thereof?
Still we say as we go,--
'Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.'

The sky leans dumb on the sea,
Aweary with all its wings;
And oh! the song the sea sings
Is dark everlastingly.
Our past is clean forgot,
Our present is and is not,
Our future's a seal'd seedplot,
And what betwixt them are we?--
We who say as we go,--
'Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.'

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The Lady's Second Song by William Butler Yeats

What sort of man is coming
To lie between your feet?
What matter, we are but women.
Wash; make your body sweet;
I have cupboards of dried fragrance.
I can strew the sheet.
i{The Lord have mercy upon us.}

He shall love my soul as though
Body were not at all,
He shall love your body
Untroubled by the soul,
Love cram love's two divisions
Yet keep his substance whole.
i{The Lord have mercy upon us.}

Soul must learn a love that is
proper to my breast,
Limbs a Love in common
With every noble beast.
If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?
i{The Lord have mercy upon us.}

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News For The Delphic Oracle by William Butler Yeats

There all the golden codgers lay,
There the silver dew,
And the great water sighed for love,
And the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall pythagoras.
plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest.
Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh because
Their cries are sweet and strange,
Through their ancestral patterns dance,
And the brute dolphins plunge
Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
They pitch their burdens off.

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An Elegy on the Death of Lady Elizabeth by Francis Beaumont

I may forget to drink, to eat, to sleep,
Remembering thee: but when I do, to weep
In well-weighed lines, that men shall at thy hearse
Envy the sorrow which brought forth my verse;
May my dull understanding have the might
Only to know her last was yesternight!
Rutland, the fair, is dead! and if to hear
The name of Sidney will more force a tear,
'Tis she that is so dead! and yet there be
Some more alive profess not poetry;
The statesmen and the lawyers of our time
Have business still, yet do it not in rhyme.
Can she be dead, and can there be of those
That are so dull to say their prayers in prose?
It is three days since she did feel Death's hand;
And yet this isle not feel the poet's land?
Hath this no new ones made? and are the old
At such a needful time as this grown cold?
They all say they would fain; but yet they plead
They cannot write, because their muse is dead.
Hear me then speak, which will take no excuse;
Sorrow can make a verse without a muse.
Why didst thou die so soon? O, pardon me,
I know it was the longest life to thee,
That e'er with modesty was called a span,
Since the Almighty left to strive with man;
Mankind is sent to sorrow; and thou hast
More of the business which thou cam'st for past,
Than all those aged women, which, yet quick,
Have quite outlived their own arithmetic.
As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief,
There were enough to meet thee; and the chief
Blessing of women, marriage, was to thee
Nought but a sacrament of misery;
For whom thou hadst, if we may trust to fame,
Could nothing change about thee but thy name:
A name which who (that were again to do't)
Would change without a thousand joys to boot?
In all things else thou rather led'st a life
Like a betrothed virgin than a wife.
But yet I would have called thy fortune kind,
If it had only tried the settled mind
With present crosses: not the loathed thought
Of worse to come, or past, then might have wrough
Thy best remembrance to have cast an eye
Back with delight upon thine infancy.
But thou hadst, ere thou knew'st the use of tears,
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;
Ere thou wert able who thou wert to tell,
By a sad war thy noble father fell,
In a dull clime, which did not understand
What 'twas to venture him to save a land.
He left two children, who for virtue, wit,
Beauty, were loved of all; thee and his wit:
Two was too few; yet death hath from us took
Thee, a more faultless issue than his book,
Which now the only living thing we have
From him, we'll see, shall never find a grave
As thou hast done. Alas! 'would it might be
That books their sexes had, as well as we,
That we might see this married to the worth,
And many poems like itself bring forth!
But this vain wish divinity controuls;
For neither to the angels, nor to souls,
Nor anything he meant should ever live,
Did the wise God of nature sexes give.
Then with his everlasting work alone
We must content ourselves, since she is gone;
Gone, like the day thou diedst upon; and we
May call that back again as soon as thee.
Who should have looked to this? Where were you all,
That do yourselves the help of nature call,
Physicians? I acknowledce you were there
To sell such words as one in health would hear:
So died she. Curst be he who shall defend
Your art of hastening nature to its end!
In this you shewed that physic can but be
At best an art to cure your poverty.
Ye're many of you impostors, and do give
To sick men potions that yourselves may live.
He that hath surfeited, and cannot eat,
Must have a medicine to procure you meat;
And that's the deepest ground of all your skill,
Unless it be some knowledge how to kill.
Sorrow and madness make my verses flow
Cross to my understanding; for I know
You can do wonders: Every day I meet
The looser sort of people in the street
From desperate diseases freed; and why
Restore you them, and suffer her to die?
Why should the state allow you colleges,
Pensions for lectures, and anatomies,
If all your potions, vomits, letting blood,
Can only cure the bad, and not the good,
Which only they can do? and I will show
The hidden reason, why you did not know
The way to cure her: You believed her blood
Ran on such courses as you understood;
By lectures you believed her arteries
Grew as they do in your anatomies:
Forgetting that the state allows you none
But only whores and thieves to practise on
And every passage 'bout them I am sure
You understood, and only them can cure;
Which is the cause that both �
Are noted for enjoying so long lives.
But noble blood treads in too strange a path
For your ill-got experience, and hath
Another way of cure. If you had seen
Penelope dissected, or the Queen
Of Sheba; then you might have found a way
To have preserved her from that fatal day.
As 'tis, you have but made her sooner blest,
By sending her to Heaven, where let her rest.
I will not hurt the peace which she would have,
By longer looking in her quiet grave.

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To Memory by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Strange Power, I know not what thou art,
Murderer or mistress of my heart.
I know I'd rather meet the blow
Of my most unrelenting foe
Than live---as now I live---to be
Slain twenty times a day by thee.

Yet, when I would command thee hence,
Thou mockest at the vain pretence,
Murmuring in mine ear a song
Once loved, alas! forgotten long;
And on my brow I feel a kiss
That I would rather die than miss.

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