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ENAMOURED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME
ENAMOURED architect of airy rhyme, | |
| Build as thou wilt; heed not what each man says: | |
| Good souls, but innocent of dreamers’ ways, | |
| Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time; | |
| Others, beholding how thy turrets climb | 5 |
| ’Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days; | |
| But most beware of those who come to praise. | |
| O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime | |
| And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all; | |
| Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame, | 10 |
| Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given: | |
| Then, if at last the airy structure fall, | |
| Dissolve, and vanish—take thyself no shame. | |
| They fail, and they alone, who have not striven. | |
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REMINISCENCE
THOUGH I am native to this frozen zone | 15 |
| That half the twelvemonth torpid lies, or dead; | |
| Though the cold azure arching overhead | |
| And the Atlantic’s never-ending moan | |
| Are mine by heritage, I must have known | |
| Life otherwhere in epochs long since fled; | 20 |
| For in my veins some Orient blood is red, | |
| And through my thought are lotus blossoms blown. | |
| I do remember … it was just at dusk, | |
| Near a walled garden at the river’s turn | |
| (A thousand summers seem but yesterday!), | 25 |
| A Nubian girl, more sweet than Khoorja musk, | |
| Came to the water-tank to fill her urn, | |
| And, with the urn, she bore my heart away! | |
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OUTWARD BOUND
I LEAVE behind me the elm-shadowed square | |
| And carven portals of the silent street, | 30 |
| And wander on with listless, vagrant feet | |
| Through seaward-leading alleys, till the air | |
| Smells of the sea, and straightway then the care | |
| Slips from my heart, and life once more is sweet. | |
| At the lane’s ending lie the white-winged fleet. | 35 |
| O restless Fancy, whither wouldst thou fare? | |
| Here are brave pinions that shall take thee far— | |
| Gaunt hulks of Norway; ships of red Ceylon; | |
| Slim-masted lovers of the blue Azores! | |
| ’T is but an instant hence to Zanzibar, | 40 |
| Or to the regions of the Midnight Sun; | |
| Ionian isles are thine, and all the fairy shores! | |
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ANDROMEDA
THE SMOOTH-WORN coin and threadbare classic phrase | |
| Of Grecian myths that did beguile my youth, | |
| Beguile me not as in the olden days: | 45 |
| I think more grief and beauty dwell with truth. | |
| Andromeda, in fetters by the sea, | |
| Star-pale with anguish till young Perseus came, | |
| Less moves me with her suffering than she, | |
| The slim girl figure fettered to dark shame, | 50 |
| That nightly haunts the park, there, like a shade, | |
| Trailing her wretchedness from street to street. | |
| See where she passes—neither wife nor maid; | |
| How all mere fiction crumbles at her feet! | |
| Here is woe’s self, and not the mask of woe: | 55 |
| A legend’s shadow shall not move you so! | |
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THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
FOREVER am I conscious, moving here, | |
| That should I step a little space aside | |
| I pass the boundary of some glorified | |
| Invisible domain—it lies so near! | 60 |
| Yet nothing know we of that dim frontier | |
| Which each must cross, whatever fate betide, | |
| To reach the heavenly cities where abide | |
| (Thus Sorrow whispers) those that were most dear, | |
| Now all transfigured in celestial light! | 65 |
| Shall we indeed behold them, thine and mine, | |
| Whose going hence made black the noonday sun?— | |
| Strange is it that across the narrow night | |
| They fling us not some token, or make sign | |
| That all beyond is not Oblivion. | 70 |
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SLEEP
WHEN to soft sleep we give ourselves away, | |
| And in a dream as in a fairy bark | |
| Drift on and on through the enchanted dark | |
| To purple daybreak—little thought we pay | |
| To that sweet bitter world we know by day. | 75 |
| We are clean quit of it, as is a lark | |
| So high in heaven no human eye can mark | |
| The thin swift pinion cleaving through the gray. | |
| Till we awake ill fate can do no ill, | |
| The resting heart shall not take up again | 80 |
| The heavy load that yet must make it bleed; | |
| For this brief space the loud world’s voice is still, | |
| No faintest echo of it brings us pain. | |
| How will it be when we shall sleep indeed? | |
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