DEATH. I. DEATH is here and death is there, Death is busy everywhere, All around, within, beneath, Our hopes, and then our fears — and when These are dead, the debt is due, Dust claims dust and we die too. IV. All things that we love and cherish, Such is our rude mortal lot— Love itself would, did they not. AUTUMN. A DIRGE. I. THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. Come, months, come away, From November to May, In your saddest array ; Of the dead cold year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. II. The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling, For the year; The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone Come, months, come away; Let your light sisters play Ye, follow the bier Of the dead cold year, And make her grave green with tear on tear. LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE. LEGHORN, July 1, 1820 THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be Whoever should behold me now, I wist, Would think I were a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art To breathe a soul into the iron heart Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, For round the walls are hung dread engines, such As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch Ixion or the Titan: or the quick Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic, Which fishers found under the utmost crag When the exulting elements in scorn As panthers sleep; -and other strange and dread More figures, or more strange; nor did he take Such shapes of unintelligible brass, To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood: Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks, The elements of what will stand the shocks Of wave and wind and time. Upon the table A pretty bowl of wood - not full of wine, But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink And call out to the cities o'er their head, Roofs, towers and shrines, the dying and the dead, Crash through the chinks of earth- and then all quaff In colour like the wake of light that stains The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains |