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  • Do not fret, do not cry, do not tax
    Your last strength, and your heart do not torture.
    You're alive, you're inside me, intact,
    As a buttress, a friend, an adventure.

    I've no fear of standing exposed
    As a fraud in my faith in the future.
    It's not life, not a union of souls
    We are breaking off, but a hoax mutual.

    From straw mattresses' sick wretchedness
    To the fresh air of wide open spaces
    It's my brother and hand. It's addressed
    Like a letter, to you, crisp and bracing.

    Like an envelope, tear it across,
    With Horizon begin correspondence,
    Give your speech the sheer Alpian force,
    Overcome the sick sense of forlornness.

    Over the bowl of Bavarian lakes
    With the marrow of osseous mountains
    You will know I was not a glib fake
    And of sugared assurances spouter.

    Fare ye well and God bless you.. Our bond
    And our honour aren't tamely domestic.
    Like a sprout in the sunlight, unbend,
    And then things will assume a new aspect.





    "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





    Comment



    • If this uncertain age in which we dwell
      Were really as dark as I hear sages tell,
      And I convinced that they were really sages,
      I should not curse myself with it to hell,
      But leaving not the chair I long have sat in,
      I should betake me back ten thousand pages
      To the world’s undebatably dark ages,
      And getting up my medieval Latin.
      Seek converse common cause and brotherhood
      (By all that’s liberal–I should, I should)
      With the poets who could calmly take the fate
      Of being born at once too early and late,
      And for those reasons kept from being great,
      Yet singing but Dione in the wood
      And ver aspergit terram
      They slowly led old Latin verse to rhyme
      And to forget the ancient lengths of time,
      And so began the modern world for us.
      I’d say, O Master of the Palace School,
      You were not Charles’ nor anybody’s fool:
      Tell me as pedagogue to pedagogue,
      You did not know that since King Charles did rule
      You had no chance but to be minor, did you?
      Your light was spent perhaps as in a fog
      That at once kept you burning low and hid you.
      The age may very well have been to blame
      For your not having won to Virgil’s fame.
      But no one ever heard you make the claim.
      You would not think you knew enough to judge
      The age when full upon you. That’s my point.
      We have today and I could call their name
      Who know exactly what is out of joint
      To make their verse and their excuses lame.
      They’ve tried to grasp with too much social fact
      Too large a situation. You and I
      Would be afraid if we should comprehend
      And get outside of too much bad statistics
      Our muscles never could again contract:
      We never could recover human shape,
      But must live lives out mentally agape,
      Or die of philosophical distention.
      That’s how we feel–and we’re no special mystics.
      We can’t appraise the time in which we act
      But for the folly of it, let’s pretend
      We know enough to know it for adverse.
      One more millennium’s about to end.
      Let’s celebrate the event, my distant friend,
      In publicly disputing which is worse,
      The present age or your age. You and I
      As schoolmen of repute should qualify
      To wage a fine scholastical contention
      As to whose age deserves the lower mark,
      Or should I say the higher one, for dark.
      I can just hear the way you make it go:
      There’s always something to be sorry for,
      A sordid peace or an outrageous war.
      Yes, yes, of course. We have the same convention.
      The groundwork of all faith is human woe.
      It was well worth preliminary mention.
      There’s nothing but injustice to be had,
      No choice is left a poet, you might add,
      But how to take the curse, tragic or comic.
      It was well worth preliminary mention.
      But let’s go on to where our cases part,
      If part they do. Let me propose a start.
      (We’re rivals in the badness of our case,
      Remember, and must keep a solemn face.)
      Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.
      Its contemplations makes us out as small
      As a brief epidemic of microbes
      That in a good glass may be seen to crawl
      The patina of this the least of globes.
      But have we there the advantage after all?
      You were belittled into vilest worms
      God hardly tolerated with his feet;
      Which comes to the same thing in different terms.
      We both are the belittled human race,
      One as compared with God and one with space.
      I had thought ours the more profound disgrace;
      But doubtless this was only my conceit.
      The cloister and the observatory saint
      Take comfort in about the same complaint.
      So science and religion really meet.
      I can just about hear you call your Palace class:
      Come learn the Latin Eheu for alas.
      You may not want to use it and you may.
      O paladins, the lesson for today
      Is how to be unhappy yet polite.
      And at the summons Roland, Olivier,
      And every sheepish paladin and peer,
      Being already more than proved in fight,
      Sits down in school to try if he can write
      Like Horace in the true Horatian vein,
      Yet like a Christian disciplined to bend
      His mind to thinking always of the end.
      Memento mori and obey the Lord.
      Art and religion love the somber chord.
      Earth’s a hard place in which to save the soul,
      And could it be brought under state control,
      So automatically we all were saved,
      Its separateness from Heaven could be waived;
      It might as well at once be kingdom-come.
      (Perhaps it will be next millennium.)
      But these are universals, not confined
      To any one time, place, or human kind.
      We’re either nothing or a God’s regret.
      As ever when philosophers are met,
      No matter where they stoutly mean to get,
      Nor what particulars they reason from,
      They are philosophers, and from old habit
      They end up in the universal Whole
      As unoriginal as any rabbit.
      One age is like another for the soul.
      I’m telling you. You haven’t said a thing,
      Unless I put it in your mouth to say.
      I’m having the whole argument my way–
      But in your favor–please to tell your King–
      In having granted you all ages shine
      With equal darkness, yours as dark as mine,
      I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat,
      Won’t know exactly what I mean by that.
      I mean so altruistically moral
      I never take my own side in a quarrel.
      I’d lay my hand on his hand on his staff
      Lean back and have my confidential laugh,
      And tell him I had read his Epitaph.
      It sent me to the graves the other day.
      The only other there was far away
      Across the landscape with a watering pot
      At his devotions in a special plot.
      And he was there resuscitating flowers
      (Make no mistake about its being bones);
      But I was only there to read the stones
      To see what on the whole they had to say
      About how long a man may think to live,
      Which is becoming my concern of late.
      And very wide the choice they seemed to give;
      Thee ages ranging all the way from hours
      To months and years and many many years.
      One man had lived one hundred years and eight.
      But though we all may be inclined to wait
      And follow some development of state,
      Or see what comes of science and invention,
      There is a limit to our time extension.
      We all are doomed to broken-off careers,
      And so’s the nation, so’s the total race.
      The earth itself is liable to the fate
      Of meaninglessly being broken off.
      (And hence so many literary tears
      At which my inclination is to scoff.)
      I may have wept that any should have died
      Or missed their chance, or not have been their best,
      Or been their riches, fame, or love denied;
      On me as much as any is the jest.
      I take my incompleteness with the rest.
      God bless himself can no one else be blessed.
      I hold your doctrine of Memento
      And were an epitaph to be my story
      I’d have a short one ready for my own.
      I would have written of me on my stone:
      I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.




      "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





      Comment


      • Look me in the stars
        And tell me truly, men of earth,
        If all the soul-and-body scars
        Were not too much to pay for birth.

        "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





        Comment




        • On Good-Nature
          by William Hazlitt
          From 'The Round Table' (1816)

          Lord Shaftesbury somewhere remarks, that a great many people pass for very good-natured persons, for no other reason than because they care about nobody but themselves; and, consequently, as nothing annoys them but what touches their own interest, they never irritate themselves unnecessarily about what does not concern them, and seem to be made of the very milk of human kindness.

          Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. A good-natured man is, generally speaking, one who does not like to be put out of his way; and as long as he can help it, that is, till the provocation comes home to himself, he will not. He does not create fictitious uneasiness out of the distresses of others; he does not fret and fume, and make himself uncomfortable about things he cannot mend, and that no way concern him, even if he could: but then there is no one who is more apt to be disconcerted by what puts him to any personal inconvenience, however trifling; who is more tenacious of his selfish indulgences, however unreasonable; or who resents more violently any interruption of his ease and comforts, the very trouble he is put to in resenting it being felt as an aggravation of the injury. A person of this character feels no emotions of anger or detestation, if you tell him of the devastation of a province, or the massacre of the inhabitants of a town, or the enslaving of a people; but if his dinner is spoiled by a lump of soot falling down the chimney, he is thrown into the utmost confusion, and can hardly recover a decent command of his temper for the whole day. He thinks nothing can go amiss, so long as he is at his ease, though a pain in his little finger makes him so peevish and quarrelsome, that nobody can come near him. Knavery and injustice in the abstract are things that by no means ruffle his temper, or alter the serenity of his countenance, unless he is to be the sufferer by them; nor is he ever betrayed into a passion in answering a sophism, if he does not think it immediately directed against his own interest.

          On the contrary, we sometimes meet with persons who regularly heat themselves in an argument, and get out of humour on every occasion, and make themselves obnoxious to a whole company about nothing. This is not because they are ill-tempered, but because they are in earnest. Good-nature is a hypocrite: it tries to pass off its love of its own ease and indifference to everything else for a particular softness and mildness of disposition. All people get in a passion, and lose their temper, if you offer to strike them, or cheat them of their money, that is, if you interfere with that which they are really interested in. Tread on the heel of one of these good-natured persons, who do not care if the whole world is in flames, and see how he will bear it. If the truth were known the most disagreeable people are the most amiable. They are the only persons who feel an interest in what does not concern them. They have as much regard for others as they have for themselves. They have as many vexations and causes of complaint as there are in the world. They are general righters of wrongs, and redressers of grievances. They not only are annoyed by what they can help, by an act of inhumanity done in the next street, or in a neighbouring country by their own countrymen, they not only do not claim any share in the glory, and hate it the more, the more brilliant the success, —but a piece of injustice done three thousand years ago touches them to the quick. They have an unfortunate attachment to a set of abstract phrases, such as liberty, truth, justice, humanity, honour, which are continually abused by knaves, and misunderstood by fools, and they can hardly contain themselves for spleen. They have something to keep them in perpetual hot water. No sooner is one question set at rest than another rises up to perplex them. They wear themselves to the bone in the affairs of other people, to whom they can do no manner of service, to the neglect of their own business and pleasure. They tease themselves to death about the morality of the Turks, or the politics of the French. There are certain words that afflict their ears, and things that lacerate their souls, and remain a plague-spot there forever after. They have a fellow-feeling with all that has been done, said, or thought in the world. They have an interest in all science and in all art. They hate a lie as much as a wrong, for truth is the foundation of all justice. Truth is the first thing in their thoughts, then mankind, then their country, last themselves. They love excellence, and bow to fame, which is the shadow of it. Above all, they are anxious to see justice done to the dead, as the best encouragement to the living, and the lasting inheritance of future generations. They do not like to see a great principle undermined, or the fall of a great man. They would sooner forgive a blow in the face than a wanton attack on acknowledged reputation. The contempt in which the French hold Shakespeare is a serious evil to them; nor do they think the matter mended, when they hear an Englishman, who would be thought a profound one, say that Voltaire was a man without wit. They are vexed to see genius playing at Tom Fool, and honesty turned bawd. It gives them a cutting sensation to see a number of things which, as they are unpleasant to see, we shall not here repeat. In short, they have a passion for truth; they feel the same attachment to the idea of what is right, that a knave does to his interest, or that a good-natured man does to his ease; and they have as many sources of uneasiness as there are actual or supposed deviations from this standard in the sum Of things, or as there is a possibility of folly and mischief in the world.

          Principle is a passion for truth: an incorrigible attachment to a general proposition. Good-nature is humanity that costs nothing. No good-natured man was ever a martyr to a cause, in religion or politics. He has no idea of striving against the stream. He may become a good courtier and a loyal subject; and it is hard if he does not, for he has nothing to do in that case but to consult his ease, interest, and outward appearances. The Vicar of Bray was a good-natured man. What a pity he was but a vicar! A good-natured man is utterly unfit for any situation or office in life that requires integrity, fortitude, or generosity, — any sacrifice, except of opinion, or any exertion, but to please. A good-natured man will debauch his friend's mistress, if he has an opportunity; and betray his friend, sooner than share disgrace or danger with him. He will not forego the smallest gratification to save the whole world. He makes his own convenience the standard of right and wrong. He avoids the feeling of pain in himself, and shuts his eyes to the sufferings of others. He will put a malefactor or an innocent person (no matter which) to the rack, and only laugh at the uncouthness of the gestures, or wonder that he is so unmannerly as to cry out. There is no villainy to which he will not lend a helping hand with great coolness and cordiality, for he sees only the pleasant and profitable side of things. He will assent to a falsehood with a leer of complacency, and applaud any atrocity that comes recommended in the garb of authority. He will betray his country to please a Minister, and sign the death-warrant of thousands of wretches, rather than forfeit the congenial smile, the well-known squeeze of the hand. The shrieks of death, the torture of mangled limbs, the last groans of despair, are things that shock his smooth humanity too much ever to make an impression on it: his good-nature sympathizes only with the smile, the bow, the gracious salutation, the fawning answer: vice loses its sting, and corruption its poison, in the oily gentleness of his disposition. He will not hear of any thing wrong in Church or State. He will defend every abuse by which any thing is to be got, every dirty job, every act of every Minister. In an extreme case, a very good-natured man indeed may try to hang twelve honester men than himself to rise at the Bar, and forge the seal of the realm to continue his colleagues a week longer in office. He is a slave to the will of others, a coward to their prejudices, a tool of their vices. A good-natured man is no more fit to be trusted in public affairs, than a coward or a woman is to lead an army. Spleen is the soul of patriotism and of public good. Lord Castlereagh is a good-natured man, Lord Eldon is a good-natured man, Charles Fox was a good-natured man. The last instance is the most decisive. The definition of a true patriot is a good hater.

          A king, who is a good-natured man, is in a fair way of being a great tyrant. A king ought to feel concern for all to whom his power extends; but a good-natured man cares only about himself. If he has a good appetite, eats and sleeps well, nothing in the universe besides can disturb him. The destruction of the lives or liberties of his subjects will not stop him in the least of his caprices, but will concoct well with his bile, and 'good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both.' He will send out his mandate to kill and destroy with the same indifference or satisfaction that he performs any natural function of his body. The consequences are placed beyond the reach of his imagination, or would not affect him if they were not, for he is a fool, and good-natured. A good-natured man hates more than anyone else whatever thwarts his will, or contradicts his prejudices; and if he has the power to prevent it, depend upon it, he will use it without remorse and without control.

          There is a lower species of this character which is what is usually understood by a well-meaning man. A well-meaning man is one who often does a great deal of mischief without any kind of malice. He means no one any harm, if it is not for his interest. He is not a knave, nor perfectly honest. He does not easily resign a good place. Mr Vansittart is a well-meaning man.

          The Irish are a good-natured people; they have many virtues, but their virtues are those of the heart, not of the head. In their passions and affections they are sincere, but they are hypocrites in understanding. If they once begin to calculate the consequences, self-interest prevails. An Irishman who trusts to his principles, and a Scotchman who yields to his impulses, are equally dangerous. The Irish have wit, genius, eloquence, imagination, affections: but they want coherence of understanding, and consequently have no standard of thought or action. Their strength of mind does not keep pace with the warmth of their feelings, or the quickness of their conceptions. Their animal spirits run away with them: their reason is a jade. There is something crude, indigested, rash, and discordant, in almost all that they do or say. They have no system, no abstract ideas. They are 'everything by starts, and nothing long.' They are a wild people. They hate whatever imposes a law on their understandings, or a yoke on their wills. To betray the principles they are most bound by their own professions and the expectations of others to maintain, is with them a reclamation of their original rights, and to fly in the face of their benefactors and friends, an assertion of their natural freedom of will. They want consistency and good faith. They unite fierceness with levity. In the midst of their headlong impulses, they have an undercurrent of selfishness and cunning, which in the end gets the better of them. Their feelings, when no longer excited by novelty or opposition, grow cold and stagnant. Their blood, if not heated by passion, turns to poison. They have a rancour in their hatred of any object they have abandoned, proportioned to the attachment they have professed to it. Their zeal, converted against itself, is furious. The late Mr Burke was an instance of an Irish patriot and philosopher. He abused metaphysics, because he could make nothing out of them, and turned his back upon liberty, when he found he could get nothing more by her. — See to the same purpose the winding up of the character of Judy in Miss Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent.





          "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





          Comment




          • There is a silence where hath been no sound,
            There is a silence where no sound may be,
            In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,
            Or in wide desert where no life is found,
            Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
            No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
            But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
            That never spoke, over the idle ground:
            But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
            Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
            Though the dun fox or wild hyæna calls,
            And owls, that flit continually between,
            Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan—
            There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

            "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





            Comment




            • They would love to see me dead, so they say: He belongs to us, he is ours.
              For twenty years I have heard their footsteps on the walls of the night.
              They open no door, yet here they are now. I see three of them:
              A poet, a killer, and a reader of books.
              When do you plan to shoot me? I asked.
              Take it easy, they answered.
              They lined up their glasses all in a row and started singing for the people.
              I asked: When will you begin my assassination?
              Already done, they said ... Why did you send your shoes on ahead to your soul?
              So it can wander the face of the earth, I said.
              The earth is wickedly dark, so why is your poem so white?
              Because my heart is teeming with thirty seas, I answered.
              They asked: How would you like your death?
              Blue, like stars pouring from a window, I answered.

              "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





              Comment



              • Tighten my fetters.
                Confiscate my papers
                and cigarettes.
                Fill my mouth with dust.
                Poetry is blood in the heart,
                salt in bread,
                moisture in eyes.
                It is written with fingernails,
                with eyes,
                with daggers.
                I shall proclaim in my detention cell,
                in the bathroom,
                in the stable,
                under the lash,
                manacled,
                in the violence of chains,
                that a million birds
                on the branches of my heart,
                are singing fighting songs.


                "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                Comment




                • Had you wept; had you but neared me with a frail uncertain ray,
                  Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large and luminous eye,
                  Then would have come back all the joys the tidings had slain that day,
                  And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven, have smoothed the things awry.
                  But you were less feebly human, and no passionate need for clinging
                  Possessed your soul to overthrow reserve when I came near;
                  Ay, though you suffer as much as I from storms the hours are bringing
                  Upon your heart and mine, I never see you shed a tear.

                  The deep strong woman is weakest, the weak one is the strong;
                  The weapon of all weapons best for winning, you have not used;
                  Have you never been able, or would you not, through the evil times and long?
                  Has not the gift been given you, or such gift have you refused?
                  When I bade me not absolve you on that evening or the morrow,
                  Why did you not make war on me with those who weep like rain?
                  You felt too much, so gained no balm for all your torrid sorrow,
                  And hence our deep division, and our dark undying pain.



                  "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                  Comment


                  • Loved these 2 poems from my O levels syllabus . Brings back alot of good memories

                    Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

                    BY ROBERT FROST

                    Whose woods these are I think I know.
                    His house is in the village though;
                    He will not see me stopping here
                    To watch his woods fill up with snow.

                    My little horse must think it queer
                    To stop without a farmhouse near
                    Between the woods and frozen lake
                    The darkest evening of the year.

                    He gives his harness bells a shake
                    To ask if there is some mistake.
                    The only other sound’s the sweep
                    Of easy wind and downy flake.

                    The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
                    But I have promises to keep,
                    And miles to go before I sleep,
                    And miles to go before I sleep.

                    I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

                    BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

                    I wandered lonely as a cloud
                    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
                    When all at once I saw a crowd,
                    A host, of golden daffodils;
                    Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
                    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

                    Continuous as the stars that shine
                    And twinkle on the milky way,
                    They stretched in never-ending line
                    Along the margin of a bay:
                    Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
                    Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

                    The waves beside them danced; but they
                    Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
                    A poet could not but be gay,
                    In such a jocund company:
                    I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
                    What wealth the show to me had brought:

                    For oft, when on my couch I lie
                    In vacant or in pensive mood,
                    They flash upon that inward eye
                    Which is the bliss of solitude;
                    And then my heart with pleasure fills,
                    And dances with the daffodils.

                    Comment




                    • ...The night sits wherever you are. Your night
                      is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes
                      from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass
                      and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow—
                      a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams
                      equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller
                      in your lilac night, I am he who was one day
                      me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed
                      the heart's rank between two grades: neither
                      the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies
                      a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you
                      is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night
                      is the covenant of night, crawling in my body
                      anesthetized like a fox's sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery
                      that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer
                      I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night
                      staring at itself safe and assured in its
                      endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror
                      and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors
                      who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry
                      on the whims of Imru' el-Qyss and others,
                      and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry
                      moon in the remoteness of speech ...


                      "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                      Comment




                      • I saw thee weep, the big bright tear
                        Came over that eye of blue;
                        And then methought it did appear
                        A violet dropping dew:
                        I saw thee smile, the sapphire's blaze
                        Beside thee ceased to shine;
                        It could not match the living rays
                        That filled that glance of thine.
                        As clouds from yonder sun receive
                        A deep and mellow dye,
                        Which scarce the shade of coming eve
                        Can banish from the sky,
                        Those smiles unto the moodiest mind
                        Their own pure joy impart;
                        Their sunshine leaves a glow behind
                        That lightens over the heart.



                        "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                        Comment



                        • ..I have m often been told by learned friars,
                          That wishing and the crime are one,
                          And heaven punishes desires
                          As much as if the deed were done..




                          "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                          Comment



                          • No one worth possessing
                            Can be quite possessed;
                            Lay that on your heart,
                            My young angry dear;
                            This truth, this hard and precious stone,
                            Lay it on your hot cheek,
                            Let it hide your tear.
                            Hold it like a crystal
                            When you are alone
                            And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
                            Long, look long and you will be blessed:
                            No one worth possessing
                            Can be quite possessed.


                            "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                            Comment




                            • UPON a noon I pilgrimed through
                              A pasture, mile by mile,
                              Unto the place where I last saw
                              My dead Love's living smile.

                              And sorrowing I lay me down
                              Upon the heated sod:
                              It seemed as if my body pressed
                              The very ground she trod.

                              I lay, and thought; and in a trance
                              She came and stood me by--
                              The same, even to the marvellous ray
                              That used to light her eye.

                              "You draw me, and I come to you,
                              My faithful one," she said,
                              In voice that had the moving tone
                              It bore in maidenhead.

                              She said: "'Tis seven years since I died:
                              Few now remember me;
                              My husband clasps another bride;
                              My children mothers she.

                              My brethren, sisters, and my friends
                              Care not to meet my sprite:
                              Who prized me most I did not know
                              Till I passed down from sight."

                              I said: "My days are lonely here;
                              I need thy smile alway:
                              I'll use this night my ball or blade,
                              And join thee ere the day."

                              A tremor stirred her tender lips,
                              Which parted to dissuade:
                              "That cannot be, O friend," she cried;
                              "Think, I am but a Shade

                              "A Shade but in its mindful ones
                              Has immortality;
                              By living, me you keep alive,
                              By dying you slay me.

                              "In you resides my single power
                              Of sweet continuance here;
                              On your fidelity I count
                              Through many a coming year."

                              --I started through me at her plight,
                              So suddenly confessed:
                              Dismissing late distaste for life,
                              I craved its bleak unrest.

                              "I will not die, my One of all!--
                              To lengthen out thy days
                              I'll guard me from minutest harms
                              That may invest my ways"

                              She smiled and went. Since then she comes
                              Oft when her birth-moon climbs,
                              Or at the seasons' ingresses
                              Or anniversary times;

                              But grows my grief. When I surcease,
                              Through whom alone lives she,
                              Ceases my Love, her words, her ways,
                              Never again to be.



                              "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                              Comment




                              • Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
                                And the daft sun-assaulter, he
                                That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
                                Save only me
                                (Nor is it sad to thee!)
                                Save only me
                                There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.
                                The gray grass is not dappled with the snow;
                                Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
                                But it is long ago-
                                It seems forever-
                                Since first I saw thee glance,
                                With all the dazzling other ones,
                                In airy dalliance,
                                Precipitate in love,
                                Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
                                Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.
                                When that was, the soft mist
                                Of my regret hung not on all the land,
                                And I was glad for thee,
                                And glad for me, I wist.
                                Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,
                                That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,
                                With those great careless wings,
                                Nor yet did I.
                                And there were other things:
                                It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:
                                Then fearful he had let thee win
                                Too far beyond him to be gathered in,
                                Snatched thee, o'er eager, with ungentle grasp.
                                Ah! I remember me
                                How once conspiracy was rife
                                Against my life-
                                The languor of it and the dreaming fond;
                                Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,
                                The breeze three odors brought,
                                And a gem-flower waved in a wand!
                                Then when I was distraught
                                And could not speak,
                                Sidelong, full on my cheek,
                                What should that reckless zephyr fling
                                But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!
                                I found that wing broken to-day!
                                For thou are dead, I said,
                                And the strange birds say.
                                I found it with the withered leaves
                                Under the eaves.



                                "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."





                                Comment

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