Where your other souls are joying, Never slumber'd, never cloying. Here your earth-born souls still speak To mortals, of their little week; Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame ; What doth strengthen and what maim : Thus ye teach us, every day, Wisdom, though fled far away!
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new!
O GODDESS! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conchéd ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awakened eyes?
I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet, scarce espied :
'Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; Their arms embracéd, and their pinions too; Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: The winged boy I knew ;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? His Psyche true!
O latest-born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy ! Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-regioned star Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heaped with flowers;
Nor Virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming!
O brightest! though too late for antique vows, Too-too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retired
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired! So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours!
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming :
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchéd thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night
To let the warm Love in!
то A NIGHTINGALE
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk : 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness, That thou, light-winged Dryad of the Trees, In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvéd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth! O, for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth,
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim!
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known :
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs;
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow!
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wing of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards!
Already with thee? Tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalméd darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild: White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and-for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath- Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self. Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf! Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:-do I wake or sleep? John Keats.
'O, WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Álone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing.
'O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
'I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew, And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too.'-
'I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful-a faery's child:
Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.
'I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone,
She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan.
'I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery's song.
'She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said :- 'I love thee true!'
'She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh'd full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four.
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