Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
I. Disappointment in LoveLocksley Hall
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (18091892)C
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.
Dreary gleams about the moorland, flying over Locksley Hall:
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the west.
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of time;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed;
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.”
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes,—
Saying, “Dost thou love me, cousin?” weeping, “I have loved thee long.”
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.
And her whisper thronged my pulses with the fulness of the spring.
And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
Puppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.
Go to him; it is thy duty,—kiss him; take his hand in thine.
Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.
Better thou wert dead before me, though I slew thee with my hand.
Rolled in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace.
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool!
Would to God—for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.
I will pluck it from my bosom, though my heart be at the root.
As the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.
No,—she never loved me truly; love is love forevermore.
That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.
To thy widowed marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.
And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;
Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again.
’T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry.
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother’s breast.
Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart.
Truly, she herself had suffered”—Perish in thy self-contempt!
I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
I have but an angry fancy: what is that which I should do?
When the ranks are rolled in vapor, and the winds are laid with sound.
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other’s heels.
Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous mother-age!
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm;
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world.
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
Left me with a palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;
Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire.
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
Though the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy’s?
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.
Full of sad experience moving toward the stillness of his rest.
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn;
I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain;
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine—
Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat!
I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle’s ward.
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day,—
Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag,—
Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun,
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books—
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time,—
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua’s moon in Ajalon!
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun,—
Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet.
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.