• There in his room, whene’er the moon looks in,
    And silvers now a shell, and now a fin,
    And o’er his chart glides like an argosy,
    Quiet and old sits he.
    Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
    Where hidest thou the while, heart’s boast,
    Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
    Star-face that lured him out from boyhood’s isle?

    ...
  • I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while.
    Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;
    Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,
    Why from me that ’s young should the wild tears fall?

    The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,
    They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams;
    And yonder ivy fondling the broke...

  • Good oars, for Arnold’s sake,
    By Laleham lightly bound,
    And near the bank, O soft,
    Darling swan!
    Let not the o’erweary wake
    Anew from natal ground,
    But where he slumbered oft,
    Slumber on.

    Be less than boat or bird,
    The pensive stream along;
    No murmur make, nor gleam,
    At his side.
    Where was it he...

  • Holy of England! since my light is short
    And faint, O rather by the sun anew
    Of timeless passion set my dial true,
    That with thy saints and thee I may consort,
    And, wafted in the cool, enshadowed port
    Of poets, seem a little sail long due,
    And be as one the call of memory drew
    Unto the saddle void since Agincourt!
    Not now, for...

  • Such natural debts of love our Oxford knows,
    So many ancient dues undesecrate,
    I marvel how the landmark of a hate
    For witness unto future time she chose;
    How out of her corroborate ranks arose
    The three, in great denial only great,
    For Art’s enshrining!… Thus, averted straight,
    My soul to seek a holier captain goes:
    That sweet...

  • True love’s own talisman, which here
    Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
    A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
    Gave to our Saxon speech:

    Chief miracle of theme and touch
    That upstart enviers adore:
    I could not love thee, dear, so much,
    Loved I not Honour more.

    No critic born since Charles was king
    But sighed in smiling, as...

  • I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
    All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;
    All night, from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.

    Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,
    Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weatherworn, galloping legion,
    With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that...

  • Are favoring ladies above thee?
      Are there dowries and lands? Do they say
    Seven others are fair? But I love thee:
              Aultre n’auray!

    All the sea is a lawn in our country;
      All the morrow, our star of delay.
    I am King: let me live on thy bounty!
              Aulture n’auray!

    To the fingers so light and so rosy
      ...

  • I would unto my fair restore
    A simple thing:
    The flushing cheek she had before!
    Out-velveting
    No more, no more,
    By Severn shore,
    The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.

    Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
    Unmoor the rose;
    Or guileful ways the salmon pass
    To sea, disclose;
    For so, alas,
    With...

  • High above hate I dwell:
    O storms! farewell.
    Though at my sill your daggered thunders play,
    Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
    To me they sound more small
    Than a young fay’s footfall:
    Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
    In Long Ago,
    And winnowed into silence on that wind
    Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but...