Sing from the South-West, bring her back the tru ants, Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing. Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields, Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry: Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need. Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood, Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed. Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October; Streaming like the flag-reed South-West blown; Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam: All seem to know what is for heaven alone. GEORGE MEREDITH. CHORUS FROM ATALANTA IN CALYDON BEFORE the beginning of years Time, with a gift of tears; Grief, with a glass that ran; Pleasure, with pain for leaven; Summer, with flowers that fell; Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell; Strength without hands to smite; Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death. And the high gods took in hand In the houses of death and of birth; And death beneath and above, For a day and a night and a morrow, That his strength might endure for a span With travail and heavy sorrow, The holy spirit of man. From the winds of the north and the south They gathered as unto strife; They breathed upon his mouth, They filled his body with life; Eyesight and speech they wrought For the veils of the soul therein, A time for labour and thought, In his eyes foreknowledge of death; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep. ALGERNON SWINBURNE. DAISY WHERE the thistle lifts a purple crown And the harebell shakes on the windy hill — O the breath of the distant surf! The hills look over on the South, Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry She listened with big-lipped surprise, Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine: Her skin was like a grape, whose veins Run snow instead of wine. She knew not those sweet words she spake, But there's never a bird, so sweet a song O, there were flowers in Storrington Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face. A look, a word of her winsome mouth, A berry red, a guileless look, A still word, strings of sand! And yet they made my wild, wild heart For standing artless as the air, She took the berries with her hand, The fairest things have fleetest end,' But the rose's scent is bitterness She looked a little wistfully, She went her unremembering way, She left me marvelling why my soul Still, still I seemed to see her, still And take the berries with her hand, Nothing begins, and nothing ends, FRANCIS THOMPSON. |