The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

  Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

  Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

  Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

  And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

  Steady thy laden head across a brook;

  Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

  Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

  Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –

  While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river shallows, borne aloft

  Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

  JOHN KEATS Ode on Melancholy

  No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

  Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

  Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

  By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

  Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

  Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

  Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

  A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

  For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

  And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

  But when the melancholy fit shall fall

  Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

  That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

  And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

  Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

  Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

  Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

  Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

  Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

  And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

  She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;

  And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

  Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

  Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

  Ay, in the very temple of Delight

  Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

  Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

  Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

  His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

  And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

  JOHN KEATS

  Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art –

  Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

  And watching, with eternal lids apart,

  Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

  The moving waters at their priestlike task

  Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

  Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –

  No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

  Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

  To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

  Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

  And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

  (1838)

  1820JOHN KEATS La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad

  O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered 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 sighed full sore,

  And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

  And there she lullèd me asleep

  And there I dreamed – Ah! woe betide! –

  The latest dream I ever dreamt

  On the cold hill side.

  I saw pale kings and princes too,

  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:

  They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

  Thee hath in thrall!’

  I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

  With horrid warning gapèd wide,

  And I awoke and found me here.

  On the cold hill’s side.

  And this is why I sojourn here

  Alone and palely loitering,

  Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Ode to the West Wind

  I

  O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

  Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

  Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

  Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,

  Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

  The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

  Each like a corpse within its grave, until

  Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

  Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

  (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

  With living hues and odours plain and hill:

  Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

  Destroyer and Preserver; hear O hear!

  II

  Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,

  Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

  Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

  Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

  On the blue surface of thine aery surge,

  Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

  Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

  Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

  The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge

  Of the dying year, to which this closing night

  Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

  Vaulted with all thy congregated might

  Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

  Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear!

  III

  Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

  The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

  Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams,

  Beside a pumice isle Baiæ’s bay,

  And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

  Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

  All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

  So sweet, the
sense faints picturing them! Thou

  For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

  Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

  The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

  The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

  Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,

  And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

  IV

  If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

  If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

  A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

  The impulse of thy strength, only less free

  Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even

  I were as in my boyhood, and could be

  The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

  As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

  Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

  As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

  Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

  I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

  A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

  One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

  V

  Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

  What if my leaves are falling like its own!

  The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

  Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

  Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

  Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

  Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

  And, by the incantation of this verse,

  Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

  Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

  Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

  The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

  If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY from The Sensitive-Plant

  [Conclusion]

  Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that

  Which within its boughs like a spirit sat

  Ere its outward form had known decay,

  Now felt this change, – I cannot say.

  Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,

  No longer with the form combined

  Which scattered love – as stars do light,

  Found sadness, where it left delight,

  I dare not guess; but in this life

  Of error, ignorance and strife –

  Where nothing is – but all things seem,

  And we the shadows of the dream,

  It is a modest creed, and yet

  Pleasant if one considers it,

  To own that death itself must be,

  Like all the rest, – a mockery.

  That garden sweet, that lady fair

  And all sweet shapes and odours there

  In truth have never past away –

  ’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed – not they.

  For love, and beauty, and delight

  There is no death nor change: their might

  Exceeds our organs – which endure

  No light – being themselves obscure.

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY from Adonais 1821

  The One remains, the many change and pass;

  Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

  Until Death tramples it to fragments. – Die,

  If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

  Follow where all is fled! – Rome’s azure sky,

  Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

  The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

  Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

  Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here

  They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!

  A light is past from the revolving year,

  And man, and woman; and what still is dear

  Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

  The soft sky smiles, – the low wind whispers near:

  ’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,

  No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

  That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

  That Beauty in which all things work and move,

  That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

  Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love

  Which through the web of being blindly wove

  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

  Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

  The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,

  Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

  The breath whose might I have invoked in song

  Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,

  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

  Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

  The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

  Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

  The soul of Adonais, like a star,

  Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

  1822GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON from The Vision of Judgment

  Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:

  His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,

  So little trouble had been given of late;

  Not that the place by any means was full,

  But since the Gallic era ‘eighty-eight’

  The devils had ta’en a longer, stronger pull,

  And ‘a pull altogether,’ as they say

  At sea – which drew most souls another way.

  The angels all were singing out of tune,

  And hoarse with having little else to do,

  Excepting to wind up the sun and moon,

  Or curb a runaway young star or two,

  Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon

  Broke out of bounds o’er the ethereal blue,