FROM "THE HOUSE OF LIFE: A SONNET-SEQUENCE" INTRODUCTORY A SONNET is a moment's monument, — To one dead, deathless hour. Look that it As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearl'd and orient. Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death. LOVESIGHT WHEN do I see thee most, beloved one? Or when, in the dusk hours (we two alone), Nor image of thine eyes in any spring, How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope The ground-whirl of the perish'd leaves of Hope, The wind of Death's imperishable wing? 1 In the drawing Mary has left a procession of revellers, and is ascending by a sudden impulse the steps of the house where she sees Christ. Her lover has followed her, and is trying to turn her back. CONSIDER the sea's listless chime : Is the sea's end: our sight may pass No furlong further. Since time was, This sound hath told the lapse of time. No quiet, which is death's, it hath ODE ON CONFLICTING CLAIMS HAST thou no right to joy, O youth grown old! who palest with the thought Of the measureless annoy, By Fate on man: and of the many men, Who groan beneath that adamantine chain Whose tightness kills, whose slackness whips the flow Of waves of futile woe: Hast thou no right to joy? Thou thinkest in thy mind To revel in the liquid Hyblian store, The pity and the woe grow more and more, Persistent still to claim The filling of thy mind. Thou thinkest that, if none in all the rout Who compass thee about Turn full their soul to that which thou desirest, Nor seek to gain thy goal, Beauty, the heart of beauty, The sweetness, yea, the thoughtful sweet ness, The one right way in each, the best, As thou art, yield to the strict law of duty; And thou from them must thine example take, Leave the amaranthine vine, O thou, foregone in this, Long struggling with a world that is amiss, Reach some old volume down, Some poet's book, which in thy bygone years Thou hast consum'd with joys as keen as fears, When o'er it thou wouldst hang with rapturous frown, Admiring with sweet envy all The exquisite of words, the lance-like fall Of mighty verses, each on each, The sweetness which did never cloy, (So wrought with thought ere touch'd with speech), And ask again, Hast thou no right to joy? Take the most precious tones that thunderstruck thine ears In gentler days gone by: And if they yield no more the old ecstasy, Then give thyself to tears. |