Author: Sidney Lanier

From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas Oft come repenting tempests here to die; Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies, […]

Death, thou’rt a cordial old and rare: Look how compounded, with what care! Time got his wrinkles reaping thee Sweet […]

Joust First. I. Bright shone the lists, blue bent the skies, And the knights still hurried amain To the tournament […]

In o’er-strict calyx lingering, Lay music’s bud too long unblown, Till thou, Beethoven, breathed the spring: Then bloomed the perfect […]

That air same Jones, which lived in Jones, He had this pint about him: He’d swear with a hundred sighs […]

My crippled sense fares bow’d along His uncompanioned way, And wronged by death pays life with wrong And I wake […]

Through seas of dreams and seas of phantasies, Through seas of solitudes and vacancies, And through my Self, the deepest […]

O marriage-bells, your clamor tells Two weddings in one breath. SHE marries whom her love compels: And I wed Goodman […]

Look where a three-point star shall weave his beam Into the slumb’rous tissue of some stream, Till his bright self […]

Written for the Art Autograph during the Irish Famine, 1880. Heartsome Ireland, winsome Ireland, Charmer of the sun and sea, […]

He’s fast asleep. See how, O Wife, Night’s finger on the lip of life Bids whist the tongue, so prattle-rife, […]

How tall among her sisters, and how fair, How grave beyond her youth, yet debonair As dawn, ‘mid wrinkled Matres […]

Well: Death is a huge omnivorous Toad Grim squatting on a twilight road. He catcheth all that Circumstance Hath tossed […]

I knowed a man, which he lived in Jones, Which Jones is a county of red hills and stones, And […]

Across the brook of Time man leaping goes On stepping-stones of epochs, that uprise Fixed, memorable, midst broad shallow flows […]

Through all that year-scarred agony of height, Unblest of bough or bloom, to where expands His wandy circlet with his […]

The innocent, sweet Day is dead. Dark Night hath slain her in her bed. O, Moors are as fierce to […]

Down mildest shores of milk-white sand, By cape and fair Floridian bay, Twixt billowy pines a surf asleep on land […]

Light rain-drops fall and wrinkle the sea, Then vanish, and die utterly. One would not know that rain-drops fell If […]

Inscribed to the Memory of John Keats. Dear uplands, Chester’s favorable fields, My large unjealous Loves, many yet one A […]

What heartache ne’er a hill! Inexorable, vapid, vague and chill The drear sand-levels drain my spirit low. With one poor […]

To-day the woods are trembling through and through With shimmering forms, that flash before my view, Then melt in green […]

Time, hurry my Love to me: Haste, haste! Lov’st not good company? Here’s but a heart-break sandy waste ‘Twixt Now […]

Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands, And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea, How long they […]

In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know Two springs that with unbroken flow Forever pour their lucent […]

Fine-tissued as her finger-tips, and white As all her thoughts; in shape like shields of prize, As if before young […]

or, The First Steamboat up the Alabama. You, Dinah! Come and set me whar de ribber-roads does meet. De Lord, […]

Swift, through some trap mine eyes have never found, Dim-panelled in the painted scene of Sleep, Thou, giant Harlequin of […]

I. Sunrise. In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main. […]

What time I paced, at pleasant morn, A deep and dewy wood, I heard a mellow hunting-horn Make dim report […]