Anonymous translation from the French
THE BIER descends, the spotless roses too,
The father’s tribute in his saddest hour:
O Earth! that bore them both, thou hast thy due,—
The fair young girl and flower.
Give them not back unto a world again,
Where mourning, grief, and agony have power,—
Where winds destroy, and suns...
We watched her breathing through the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.
So silently we seemed to speak,
So slowly moved about,
As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her living out.
Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied—...
Her suffering ended with the day;
Yet lived she at its close,
And breathed the long, long night away,
In statue-like repose.
But when the sun, in all his state,
Illumed the eastern skies,
She passed through glory’s morning-gate,
And walked in Paradise!
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
Ah! would that I did too.
Her mirth the world required:
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.
Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for...
To a Friend Dying
THEY tell you that Death ’s at the turn of the road,
That under the shade of a cypress you ’ll find him,
And, struggling on wearily, lashed by the goad
Of pain, you will enter the black mist behind him.
I can walk with you up to the ridge of the hill,
And we ’ll talk of the way we have come through the valley;
...
From “The Lady of the Lake,” Canto III.
HE is gone on the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Like a summer-dried fountain
When our need was the sorest.
The font, reappearing,
From the rain-drops shall borrow,
But to us comes no cheering,
To Duncan no morrow:
The hand of the reaper
Takes the ears that...
Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass.
Little has yet been changed, I think;
The shutters are shut,—no light may pass
Save two long rays through the hinge’s chink.
Sixteen years...
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden lived, whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love, and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love,...
Thy braes were bonny, Yarrow stream!
When first on them I met my lover;
Thy braes how dreary, Yarrow stream!
When now thy waves his body cover.
Forever now, O Yarrow stream!
Thou art to me a stream of sorrow;
For never on thy banks shall I
Behold my love, the flower of Yarrow.
He promised me a milk-white steed,...
From “The Fire-Worshippers”
FAREWELL,—farewell to thee, Araby’s daughter!
(Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea;)
No pearl ever lay under Oman’s green water
More pure in its shell than thy spirit in thee.
O, fair as the sea-flower close to thee growing,
How light was thy heart till love’s witchery came,
Like the wind of the...
