| Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907. | | | Phantasmion. A Fairy Tale (1837)
IV. “O Sleep, My Babe” | | By Sarah Coleridge (1802–1850) |
| | (From Chapter XVI.)
SLEEP, my babe, hear not the rippling wave, | |
| Nor feel the breeze that round thee lingering stray, | |
| To drink thy balmy breath, | |
| And sigh one long farewell. | |
| |
| Soon shall it mourn above thy wat’ry bed, | 5 |
| And whisper to me, on the wave-beat shore, | |
| Deep murm’ring in reproach, | |
| Thy sad untimely fate. | |
| |
| Ere those dear eyes had opened on the light, | |
| In vain to plead, thy coming life was sold, | 10 |
| O! wakened but to sleep, | |
| Whence it can wake no more! | |
| |
| A thousand and a thousand silken leaves | |
| The tufted beech unfolds in early spring, | |
| All clad in tenderest green, | 15 |
| All of the self-same shape: | |
| |
| A thousand infant faces, soft and sweet, | |
| Each year sends forth, yet every mother views | |
| Her last not least beloved | |
| Like its dear self alone. | 20 |
| |
| No musing mind hath ever yet foreshaped | |
| The face to-morrow’s sun shall first reveal, | |
| No heart hath e’er conceived | |
| What love that face will bring. | |
| |
| O sleep, my babe, nor heed how mourns the gale | 25 |
| To part with thy soft locks and fragrant breath, | |
| As when it deeply sighs | |
| O’er autumn’s latest bloom. | | | | |
|
|
