The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind
Zermatt to the Matterhorn
Thirty-two years since, up against the sun, Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight, Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height, And four lives paid for what the seven had won. They were the
God-Forgotten
I towered far, and lo! I stood within The presence of the Lord Most High, Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win Some answer to their cry. “The Earth, say’st thou? The
Afterwards
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man
She At His Funeral
THEY bear him to his resting-place In slow procession sweeping by; I follow at a stranger’s space; His kindred they, his sweetheart I. Unchanged my gown of garish dye, Though sable-sad is their attire;
A Broken Appointment
You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion
The Impercipient
(at a Cathedral Service) THAT from this bright believing band An outcast I should be, That faiths by which my comrades stand Seem fantasies to me, And mirage-mists their Shining Land, Is a drear
Satires of Circumstance in Fifteen Glimpses VIII: In the St
He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes
The Convergence Of The Twain
(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”) I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. II Steel chambers, late the
Embarcation
Southampton Docks: October 1899 Here, where Vespasian’s legions struck the sands, And Cendric with the Saxons entered in, And Henry’s army lept afloat to win Convincing triumphs over neighboring lands, Vaster battalions press for
The Man He Killed
Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have set us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot
The Milkmaid
Under a daisied bank There stands a rich red ruminating cow, And hard against her flank A cotton-hooded milkmaid bends her brow. The flowery river-ooze Upheaves and falls; the milk purrs in the pail;
A Wife In London
December 1899 I She sits in the tawny vapour That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled, Behind whose webby fold-on-fold Like a waning taper The street-lamp glimmers cold. A messenger’s knock cracks smartly, Flashed news
Shelley's Skylark (The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March)
Somewhere afield here something lies In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust That moved a poet to prophecies – A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust The dust of the lark that Shelley heard, And made immortal
By the Earth's Corpse
I “O Lord, why grievest Thou? – Since Life has ceased to be Upon this globe, now cold As lunar land and sea, And humankind, and fowl, and fur Are gone eternally, All is