These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue,
When Contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new.
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then...
Playing Blind-Man’s-Buff
YOU charm when you talk, walk, or move,
Still more on this day than another:
When blinded—you ’re taken for Love;
When the bandage is off—for his mother!
True genius, but true woman! dost deny
Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn,
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity?
Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn;
Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn,
Floats back dishevelled strength in agony,
Disproving thy man’s...
Victor in poesy! Victor in romance!
Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears!
French of the French and lord of human tears!
Child-lover, bard, whose fame-lit laurels glance,
Darkening the wreaths of all that would advance
Beyond our strait their claim to be thy peers!
Weird Titan, by thy wintry weight of years
As yet unbroken!...
See, from this counterfeit of him
Whom Arno shall remember long,
How stern of lineament, how grim,
The father was of Tuscan song!
There but the burning sense of wrong,
Perpetual care, and scorn, abide—
Small friendship for the lordly throng,
Distrust of all the world beside.
Faithful if this wan image be,
No dream his...
1805–1875
a Being cleaves the moonlit air,
With eyes of dew and plumes of fire,
New-born, immortal, strong and fair;
Glance ere he goes!
His feet are shrouded like the dead,
But in his face a wild desire
Breaks like the dawn that flushes red,
And like a rose.
The stars shine out above his path,...
From “An Elegy on a Friend’s Passion for His Astrophill”
WITHIN these woods of Arcadia
He chiefe delight and pleasure tooke,
And on the mountaine Parthenie,
Upon the chrystall liquid brooke,
The Muses met him ev’ry day,
That taught him sing, to write, and say.
When he descended downe the mount,
His personage seemed most...
The Muse’s fairest light in no dark time,
The wonder of a learnèd age; the line
Which none can pass! the most proportioned wit,—
To nature, the best judge of what was fit;
The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen;
The voice most echoed by consenting men;
The soul which answered best to all well said
By others, and which most requital...
AH Ben!
Say how or when
Shall we, thy guests,
Meet at those lyric feasts,
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.
My Ben!...
This figure, 1 that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Graver had a strife
With Nature to outdo the life:
O, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.
But since he cannot, Reader, look
Not at his...
