Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry, 

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry 

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. 

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, 

Have left me to that solitude, which suits 

Abstruser musings: save that at my side 

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs 

And vexes meditation with its strange 

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, 

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, 

With all the numberless goings-on of life, 

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame 

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; 

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, 

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. 

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature 

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, 

Making it a companionable form, 

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit 

By its own moods interprets, every where 

Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 

And makes a toy of Thought. 

                      But O! how oft, 

How oft, at school, with most believing mind, 

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, 

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft 

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt 

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, 

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang 

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, 

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me 

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear 

Most like articulate sounds of things to come! 

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, 

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! 

And so I brooded all the following morn, 

Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye 

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: 

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched 

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, 

For still I hoped to see the stranger's face, 

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, 

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! 

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, 

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, 

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies 

And momentary pauses of the thought! 

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart 

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, 

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, 

And in far other scenes! For I was reared 

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, 

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. 

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze 

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear 

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 

Of that eternal language, which thy God 

Utters, who from eternity doth teach 

Himself in all, and all things in himself. 

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould 

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 

Whether the summer clothe the general earth 

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch 

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 

Heard only in the trances of the blast, 

Or if the secret ministry of frost 

Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

This Lime Tree Bower My Prison

The poem begins by explaining how the narrator was separated from his friends:^[7]

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;^[8]

— lines 1–9

The poem then describes the journey in the Quantocks from Lamb's point of view, and then goes on to describe Lamb:^[9]

                     Now, my Friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! [...]^[8]

— lines 20–32

Twilight is described as calming and the poem continues with night's fall:^[10]

                      And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path across the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.^[8]

— lines 51-76

Robert Hass

 

The Nineteenth Century as a Song 

“How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” 

   John Gray’s translation of Verlaine 

& Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861

shorted him four centimes

on a pound of tripe.

He thought himself a clever man

and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,   

gazed briefly at what Tennyson called 

“the sweet blue sky.”

It was a warm day.

What clouds there were

were made of sugar tinged with blood.

They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages   

new settings of the songs

Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.

    The poet is a monarch of the clouds 

& Swinburne on his northern coast

“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” 

composed that lovely elegy 

and then found out Baudelaire was still alive 

whom he had lodged dreamily

in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.” 

   Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.   

    He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, 

   over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century

while Marx in the library gloom

studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit 

and that gentle man Bakunin,

home after fingerfucking the countess,   

applies his numb hands

to the making of bombs.

Edward Thomas

 

Adelstrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop -- 
The name, because one afternoon 
Of heat the express-train drew up there 
Unwontedly. It was late June. 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. 
No one left and no one came 
On the bare platform. What I saw 
Was Adlestrop -- only the name 

And willows, willow-herb, and grass, 
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, 
No whit less still and lonely fair 
Than the high cloudlets in the sky. 

And for that minute a blackbird sang 
Close by, and round him, mistier, 
Farther and farther, all the birds 
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

'My own heart let me more have pity on'

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies

Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- 

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches. 

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches, 

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair. 

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare 

Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches 

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches 

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there 

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on. 

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark 

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone! 

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark 

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone 

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark 

                            Is any of him at all so stark 

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, 

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection. 

                            Across my foundering deck shone 

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash 

Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash: 

                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash, 

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and 

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, 

                            Is immortal diamond. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
   As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
   Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
   Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
   Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
   Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
   Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
   To the Father through the features of men's faces.

George Gordon Lord Byron

Bad Boy Byron

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,
  When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
  The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
  I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time,  

       -- Don Juan, Canto I

George Gordon Lord Byron

• 
  Extended Catalogue Entry

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay wither’d and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d;

And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,

But through it there roll’d not the breath of his pride:

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail;

And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!