Beauty by Edward Thomas
WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, hapily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there
= = = = = = = = = =
Part Three: Love, XLIX by Emily Dickinson
WE outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
= = = = = = = = = =
Thoughts by Walt Whitman
Of these years I sing,
How they pass and have pass'd, through convuls'd pains as through
parturitions;
How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure
fulfillment, the Absolute Success, despite of people--
Illustrates evil as well as good;
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths,
obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity;
How few see the arrived models, the Athletes, the Western States--or
see freedom or spirituality--or hold any faith in results,
(But I see the Athletes--and I see the results of the war glorious
and inevitable--and they again leading to other results;)
How the great cities appear--How the Democratic masses, turbulent,
wilful, as I love them;
How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the
sounding and resounding, keep on and on;
How society waits unform'd, and is for awhile between things ended
and things begun;
How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of
freedom, and of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society,
and of all that is begun;
And how The States are complete in themselves--And how all triumphs
and glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward,
And how these of mine, and of The States, will in their turn be
convuls'd, and serve other parturitions and transitions,
And how all people, sights, combinations, the Democratic masses, too,
serve--and how every fact, and war itself, with all its
horrors, serves,
And how now, or at any time, each serves the exquisite transition of
death.
OF seeds dropping into the ground--of birth,
Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to
Impregnable and swarming places,
Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and the rest, are to be,
Of what a few years will show there in Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada,
and the rest;
(Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska;)
Of what the feuillage of America is the preparation for--and of what
all sights, North, South, East and West, are;
Of This Union, soak'd, welded in blood--of the solemn price paid--of
the unnamed lost, ever present in my mind;
--Of the temporary use of materials, for identity's sake,
Of the present, passing, departing--of the growth of completer men
than any yet,
Of myself, soon, perhaps, closing up my songs by these shores,
Of California, of Oregon--and of me journeying to live and sing
there;
Of the Western Sea--of the spread inland between it and the spinal
river,
Of the great pastoral area, athletic and feminine,
of all sloping down there where the fresh free giver, the mother, the
Mississippi flows,
Of future women there--of happiness in those high plateaus, ranging
three thousand miles, warm and cold;
Of mighty inland cities yet unsurvey'd and unsuspected, (as I am
also, and as it must be;)
Of the new and good names--of the modern developments--of inalienable
homesteads;
Of a free and original life there--of simple diet and clean and sweet
blood;
Of litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there;
Of immense spiritual results, future years, far west, each side of
the Anahuacs;
Of these leaves, well understood there, (being made for that area;)
Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there;
(O it lurks in me night and day--What is gain, after all, to
savageness and freedom?)
= = = = = = = = = =
Spring Night by Sarah Teasdale
The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,
The drowsy lights along the paths
Are dim and pearled.
Gold and gleaming the empty streets,
Gold and gleaming the misty lake,
The mirrored lights like sunken swords,
Glimmer and shake.
Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
O, beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love,
With youth, a singing voice, and eyes
To take earth's wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride,
Why am I unsatisfied, --
I, for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light, --
I, for whom all beauty burns
Like incense in a million urns?
O beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?
= = = = = = = = = =
Ad Sylonem by Richard Lovelace
Ep. 104
Aut sodes mihi redde decem sestertia, Sylo,
Deindo esto quam vis saevus et indomitus;
Aut si te nummi delectant, desine, quaeso,
Leno esse, atque idem saevus et indomitus.
ENGLISH.
Sylo, pray pay me my ten sesterces,
Then rant and roar as much as you shall please;
Or if that mony takes [you,] pray, give ore
To be a pimp, or else to rant and roar.
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