The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost: –

  I am the self-consumer of my woes; –

  They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,

  Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes: –

  And yet I am, and live – like vapours tost

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, –

  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

  But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;

  Even the dearest, that I love the best

  Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

  I long for scenes, where man hath never trod

  A place where woman never smiled or wept

  There to abide with my Creator, God;

  And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept,

  Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,

  The grass below – above the vaulted sky.

  WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 1849

  I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

  Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art:

  I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

  It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

  MATTHEW ARNOLD from Resignation. To Fausta

  [The Poet]

  He sees the gentle stir of birth

  When morning purifies the earth;

  He leans upon a gate and sees

  The pastures, and the quiet trees.

  Low, woody hill, with gracious bound,

  Folds the still valley almost round;

  The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn,

  Is answer’d from the depth of dawn;

  In the hedge straggling to the stream,

  Pale, dew-drench’d, half-shut roses gleam;

  But, where the farther side slopes down,

  He sees the drowsy new-waked clown

  In his white quaint-embroider’d frock

  Make, whistling, tow’rd his mist-wreathed flock –

  Slowly, behind his heavy tread,

  The wet, flower’d grass heaves up its head.

  Lean’d on his gate, he gazes – tears

  Are in his eyes, and in his ears

  The murmur of a thousand years.

  Before him he sees life unroll,

  A placid and continuous whole –

  That general life, which does not cease,

  Whose secret is not joy, but peace;

  That life, whose dumb wish is not miss’d

  If birth proceeds, if things subsist;

  The life of plants, and stones, and rain,

  The life he craves – if not in vain

  Fate gave, what chance shall not control,

  His sad lucidity of soul.

  (…)

  And though fate grudge to thee and me

  The poet’s rapt security,

  Yet they, believe me, who await

  No gifts from chance, have conquer’d fate.

  They, winning room to see and hear,

  And to men’s business not too near,

  Through clouds of individual strife

  Draw homeward to the general life.

  Like leaves by suns not yet uncurl’d;

  To the wise, foolish; to the world,

  Weak; – yet not weak, I might reply,

  Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye,

  To whom each moment in its race,

  Crowd as we will its neutral space,

  Is but a quiet watershed

  Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed.

  1850EMILY JANE BRONTE and CHARLOTTE BRONTE The Visionary

  Silent is the house: all are laid asleep:

  One alone looks out o’er the snow-wreaths deep,

  Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze

  That whirls the wildering drift, and bends the groaning trees.

  Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;

  Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;

  The little lamp burns straight, its rays shoot strong and far:

  I trim it well, to be the wanderer’s guiding-star.

  Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame;

  Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame:

  But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know,

  What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

  What I love shall come like visitant of air,

  Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;

  What loves me, no word of mine shall e’er betray,

  Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

  Burn, then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear –

  Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air:

  He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me;

  Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON from In Memoriam A.H.H.

  II

  Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

  That name the under-lying dead,

  Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

  Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

  The seasons bring the flower again,

  And bring the firstling to the flock;

  And in the dusk of thee, the clock

  Beats out the little lives of men.

  O not for thee the glow, the bloom,

  Who changest not in any gale,

  Nor branding summer suns avail

  To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

  And gazing on thee, sullen tree,

  Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,

  I seem to fail from out my blood

  And grow incorporate into thee.

  VII

  Dark house, by which once more I stand

  Here in the long unlovely street,

  Doors, where my heart was used to beat

  So quickly, waiting for a hand,

  A hand that can be clasped no more –

  Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

  And like a guilty thing I creep

  At earliest morning to the door.

  He is not here; but far away

  The noise of life begins again,

  And ghastly through the drizzling rain

  On the bald street breaks the blank day.

  XI

  Calm is the morn without a sound,

  Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

  And only through the faded leaf

  The chestnut pattering to the ground:

  Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

  And on these dews that drench the furze,

  And all the silvery gossamers

  That twinkle into green and gold:

  Calm and still light on yon great plain

  That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

  And crowded farms and lessening towers,

  To mingle with the bounding main:

  Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

  These leaves that redden to the fall;

  And in my heart, if calm at all,

  If any calm, a calm despair:

  Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

  And waves that sway themselves in rest,

  And dead calm in that noble breast

  Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

  LVI

  ‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

  From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone

  She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

  I care for nothing, all shall go.

  ‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

  I bring to life, I bring to death:

  The spirit does but mean the breath:

  I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

  Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,

  Such splendid purpose in his eye,

  Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,

  Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

  Who trusted God was love indeed

  And love
Creation’s final law –

  Though Nature, red in tooth and claw

  With ravine, shrieked against his creed –

  Who loved, who suffered countless ills,

  Who battled for the True, the Just,

  Be blown about the desert dust,

  Or sealed within the iron hills?

  No more? A monster then, a dream,

  A discord. Dragons of the prime,

  That tare each other in their slime,

  Were mellow music matched with him.

  O life as futile, then, as frail!

  O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

  What hope of answer, or redress?

  Behind the veil, behind the veil.

  CXV

  Now fades the last long streak of snow,

  Now burgeons every maze of quick

  About the flowering squares, and thick

  By ashen roots the violets blow.

  Now rings the woodland loud and long,

  The distance takes a lovelier hue,

  And drowned in yonder living blue

  The lark becomes a sightless song.

  Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,

  The flocks are whiter down the vale,

  And milkier every milky sail

  On winding stream or distant sea;

  Where now the seamew pipes, or dives

  In yonder greening gleam, and fly

  The happy birds, that change their sky

  To build and brood; that live their lives

  From land to land; and in my breast

  Spring wakens too; and my regret

  Becomes an April violet,

  And buds and blossoms like the rest.

  THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES from Death’s Jest Book, Or the Fool’s Tragedy

  A church-yard with the ruins of a spacious gothic cathedral. On the cloister walls the DANCE OF DEATH is painted. On one side the sepulchre of the Dukes with massy carved folding doors. Moonlight.

  DUKE

  And what’s your tune?

  ISBRAND

  What is the night-bird’s tune, wherewith she startles

  The bee out of his dream, that turns and kisses

  The inmost of his flower and sleeps again?

  What is the lobster’s tune when he is boiling?

  I hate your ballads that are made to come

  Round like a squirrel’s cage, and round again.

  We nightingales sing boldly from our hearts:

  So listen to us.

  Song by ISBRAND

  Squats on a toad-stool under a tree

  A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom,

  Crying with frog voice, ‘What shall I be?

  Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me

  Scarcely alive in her wicked womb.

  What shall I be? shall I creep to the egg

  That’s cracking asunder yonder by Nile,

  And with eighteen toes,

  And a snuff-taking nose,

  Make an Egyptian crocodile?

  Sing, “Catch a mummy by the leg

  And crunch him with an upper jaw,

  Wagging tail and clenching claw;

  Take a bill-full from my craw,

  Neighbour raven, caw, O caw,

  Grunt, my crocky, pretty maw!

  And give a paw.”

  ‘Swine, shall I be one? ’Tis a dear dog;

  But for a smile, and kiss, and pout,

  I much prefer your black-lipped snout,

  Little, gruntless, fairy hog,

  Godson of the hawthorn hedge.

  For, when Ringwood snuffs me out,

  And ’gins my tender paunch to grapple,

  Sing, “’Twixt your ancles visage wedge,

  And roll up like an apple.”

  ‘Serpent Lucifer, how do you do?

  Of your worms and your snakes I’d be one or two

  For in this dear planet of wool and of leather

  ’Tis pleasant to need no shirt, breeches or shoe,

  And have arm, leg, and belly together.

  Then aches your head, or are you lazy?

  Sing, “Round your neck your belly wrap,

  Tail-a-top, and make your cap

  Any bee and daisy.”

  ‘I’ll not be a fool, like the nightingale

  Who sits up all midnight without any ale,

  Making a noise with his nose;

  Nor a camel, although ’tis a beautiful back;

  Nor a duck, notwithstanding the music of quack

  And the webby, mud-patting toes.

  I’ll be a new bird with the head of an ass,

  Two pigs’ feet, two men’s feet, and two of a hen;

  Devil-winged; dragon-bellied; grave-jawed, because grass

  Is a beard that’s soon shaved, and grows seldom again

  Before it is summer; so cow all the rest;

  The new Dodo is finished. O! come to my nest.’

  (… )

  Song.

  By female voices

  We have bathed, where none have seen us,

  In the lake and in the fountain,

  Underneath the charmed statue

  Of the timid, bending Venus,

  When the water-nymphs were counting

  In the waves the stars of night,

  And those maidens started at you,

  Your limbs shone through so soft and bright.

  But no secrets dare we tell,

  For thy slaves unlace thee,

  And he, who shall embrace thee,

  Waits to try thy beauty’s spell.

  ( … )

  Dirge (for Sibylla)

  We do lie beneath the grass

  In the moonlight, in the shade

  Of the yew-tree. They that pass

  Hear us not. We are afraid

  They would envy our delight,

  In our graves by glow-worm night.

  Come follow us, and smile as we;

  We sail to the rock in the ancient waves,

  Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea,

  And the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.