Because I could not stop for Death-
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just Ourselves-
And Immortality.
...
A woman waits for me- she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the
right man were lacking.
...
Each night, earth life suspended,
Without asking where you are going
Or who you are, you experience
As if life dreams of itself,
...
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
...
I weep for Adonais -he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
...
O! nothing earthly save the ray
(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye,
As in those gardens where the day
Springs from the gems of Circassy-
...
To fulfil immortality in life
Is woman's truth
Whose sole deed is
To disclose us to ourselves,
...
Foil'd by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life, we say
The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne.
...
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
...
O Love! thou makest all things even
In earth or heaven;
Finding thy way through prison-bars
Up to the stars;
...
In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
...
This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame --
...
On Hellespont, guilty of true-love's blood,
In view and opposite two cities stood,
Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune's might;
The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight.
...
O Love! thou makest all things even
In earth or heaven;
Finding thy way through prison-bars
Up to the stars;
...
AS I sat alone, by blue Ontario's shore,
As I mused of these mighty days, and of peace return'd, and the dead
that return no more,
...
In Sleeping Beauty's castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
...
My life closed twice before its close--
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
...
Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
...
O Sovereign power of love! O grief! O balm!
All records, saving thine, come cool, and calm,
And shadowy, through the mist of passed years:
For others, good or bad, hatred and tears
...
I Saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
...
721
Behind Me—dips Eternity—
Before Me—Immortality—
...
Love Echoes Love Echoes
In Euphony In Symphony
In vast Universe
In Milky Way.
...
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
...
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
...
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
...
'Attar began The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-tair) with an invocation praising the holy Creator in which he suggested that one must live a hundred lives to know oneself; but you must know God by the deity, not by yourself, for God opens the way, not human wisdom. 'Attar believed that God is beyond all human knowledge. The soul will manifest itself when the body is laid aside. One cannot gain spiritual knowledge without dying to all things. When the birds assemble, they wonder why they have no king. The Hoopoe presents herself as a messenger from the invisible world with knowledge of God and the secrets of creation. She recommends Simurgh as their true king, saying that one of his feathers fell on China.
The Nightingale says that the love of the Rose satisfies him, and the journey is beyond his strength; but the Hoopoe warns against being a slave of passing love that interferes with seeking self-perfection. The Parrot longs for immortality, and the Hoopoe encourages the Peacock to choose the whole. The Duck is too content with water to seek the Simurgh. The Hoopoe advises the Partridge that gems are just colored stones and that love of them hardens the heart; she should seek the real jewel of sound quality. The Humay is distracted by ambition, and the Owl loves only the treasure he has found. The Hoopoe reprimands the Sparrow for taking pride in humility and recommends struggling bravely with oneself. She states that the different birds are just shadows of the Simurgh. If they succeed, they will not be God; but they will be immersed in God. If they look in their hearts, they will see the divine image. All appearances are just the shadow of the Simurgh. Those loving truly do not think about their own lives and sacrifice their desires. Those grounded in love renounce faith and religion as well as unbelief. One must hear with the ear of the mind and the heart.
...
O Liberty! thou goddess, heavenly bright,
profuse of bliss and pregnant with delight,
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
...
There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
...
Blessed be Thou for all the joy
My soul has felt today!
O let its memory stay with me
And never pass away!
...
Muse of my native land! loftiest Muse!
O first-born on the mountains! by the hues
Of heaven on the spiritual air begot:
Long didst thou sit alone in northern grot,
...
O woman, you are not merely the
handiwork of God, but also of men;
these are ever endowing you with
beauty from their hearts.
...
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
...
Sometime now past in the Autumnal Tide,
When Ph{oe}bus wanted but one hour to bed,
The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,
Were gilded o're by his rich golden head.
Their leaves and fruits seem'd painted but was true
...
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature
-- not his Father but his Mother stirs
within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality. From time to time she claims
...
I
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
...
Come to my arms --- is it eve? is it morn?
Is Apollo awake? Is Diana reborn?
Are the streams in full song? Do the woods whisper hush
Is it the nightingale? Is it the thrush?
...
I lost the love of heaven above,
I spurned the lust of earth below,
I felt the sweets of fancied love
And hell itself my only foe.
...
So it is eighteen years,
Helena, since we met!
A season so endears,
Nor you nor I forget
...
I see around me tombstones grey
Stretching their shadows far away.
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
Lie low and lone the silent dead -
...
549
That I did always love
I bring thee Proof
...
Give me the flute, and sing
immortality lies in a song
...
Introduction: Wonders of the lights, the meditative aurora of the world...
In silenced sleepless nights
They draw me close to them,
...
552
An ignorance a Sunset
Confer upon the Eye—
...
809
Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
...
EARTH, round, rolling, compact--suns, moons, animals--all these are
words to be said;
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances--beings, premonitions, lispings
...
NAY, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,--
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
...
OF bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
'Till I my long laborious work compleat:
...
. Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned--
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed Scholars only--this immense
...
68
Ambition cannot find him.
Affection doesn't know
...
COME, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.
...
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor,
...
Upon a time, before the faery broods
Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,
Before King Oberon's bright diadem,
...
Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies -
A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust
...
Here where the end of bone is no end of song
And the earth is bedecked with immortality
In what was poetry
And now is pride beside
...
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author:
"As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits,which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine lightof the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the CelestialFire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth thesame." -- Cor. Agrippa, Occult Philosophy,
...
UPON a noon I pilgrimed through
A pasture, mile by mile,
Unto the place where I last saw
My dead Love's living smile.
...
Now the storm begins to lower,
(Haste, the loom of Hell prepares!)
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air.
...
Undoubtedly he will relent, and turn
From his displeasure; in whose look serene,
When angry most he seemed and most severe,
What else but favour, grace, and mercy, shone?
...
A spirit passed before me: I beheld
The face of immortality unveiled--
Deep sleep came down on every eye save mine--
...
As I lay in my bed slepe full unmete
Was unto me, but why that I ne might
Rest I ne wist, for there n'as erthly wight
[As I suppose] had more of hertis ese
...
I.
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
...
MANHATTAN'S streets I saunter'd, pondering,
On time, space, reality--on such as these, and abreast with them,
prudence.
...
O, for that warning voice, which he, who saw
The Apocalypse, heard cry in Heaven aloud,
Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,
Came furious down to be revenged on men,
...
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
...
to the memory of my friend SI-YA-U,
whose head was cut off in Shanghai
A CLAIM
...
When I am old, my bones will make music with every crack,
creating rhythms throughout my spinal cord and back
that tell fractured stories of where I've been.
All 206 of them are shells that breathe life into the living,
...
I was a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked
why men die for words.
...
705
Suspense—is Hostiler than Death—
Death—tho'soever Broad,
...
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world,s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear.
...
STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
...
I thank thee, friend, for the beautiful thought
That in words well chosen thou gavest to me,
Deep in the life of my soul it has wrought
With its own rare essence to ever imbue me,
...
NO coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
...
NIGHT on the prairies;
The supper is over--the fire on the ground burns low;
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets:
...
797
By my Window have I for Scenery
Just a Sea—with a Stem—
...
A Conversation Poem, April, 1798
No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
...
1
Today, recovering from influenza,
I begin, having nothing worse to do,
This autobiography that ends a
...
RESPONDEZ! Respondez!
(The war is completed--the price is paid--the title is settled beyond
recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
...
679
Conscious am I in my Chamber,
Of a shapeless friend—
...
From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;
From lethargy to fever of the heart;
From faithful life to dream-dower'd days apart;
From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;--
...
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
...
Now Morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl,
When Adam waked, so customed; for his sleep
Was aery-light, from pure digestion bred,
...
When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too,
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
...
I
I saw a dead man's finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
...
The night wind moans uneasy
As dying embers leap,
Somnolence enveloping
The chambers of the keep;
...
I.
Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
...
I
Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:
His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,
...
THE indications, and tally of time;
Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs;
Time, always without flaw, indicates itself in parts;
...
THE chiefs were set; the soldiers crown'd the
field:
To these the master of the seven-fold shield
Upstarted fierce: and kindled with disdain.
...
I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
...
Thomas
To India! Yea, here I may take ship;
From here the courses go over the seas,
Along which the intent prows wonderfully
Nose like lean hounds, and tack their journeys out,
...
grow in the mind,
their rhymes chiming endlessly
with the sound of feet walking
or rain falling or being taken up
...
Youth that rides the wildest horse,
Youth that throws the deadliest steer,
Spending strength without remorse,
Grappling with the ghosts of fear,
...
Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.--BYRON.
I.
A glorious people vibrated again
...
Here in the dark, O heart;
Alone with the enduring Earth, and Night,
And Silence, and the warm strange smell of clover;
...
By love are blest the gods on high,
Frail man becomes a deity
When love to him is given;
'Tis love that makes the heavens shine
...