London_Girl
Age: 124
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A WINTER LANDSCAPE.
ALL night, all day, in dizzy, downward flight, Fell the wild-whirling, vague, chaotic snow, Till every landmark of the earth below, Trees, moorlands, roads, and each familiar sight Were blotted out by the bewildering white. And winds, now shrieking loud, now whimpering low, Seemed lamentations for the world-old woe That death must swallow life, and darkness light.
But all at once the rack was blown away, The snowstorm hushing ended in a sigh; Then like a flame the crescent moon on high Leaped forth among the planets; pure as they, Earth vied in whiteness with the Milky Way: Herself a star beneath the starry sky.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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THE ROBIN REDBREAST.
THE year's grown songless! No glad pipings thrill The hedge-row elms, whose wind-worn branches shower Their leaves on the sere grass, where some late flower In golden chalice hoards the sunlight still. Our summer guests, whose raptures used to fill Each apple-blossomed garth and honeyed bower, Have in adversity's inclement hour Abandoned us to bleak November's chill.
But hearken! Yonder russet bird among The crimson clusters of the homely thorn Still bubbles o'er with little rills of song-- A blending of sweet hope and resignation: Even so, when life of love and youth is shorn, One friend becomes its last, best consolation.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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THE SLEEPING BEAUTY.
THERE was intoxication in the air; The wind, keen blowing from across the seas, O'er leagues of new-ploughed land and heathery leas, Smelt of wild gorse whose gold flamed everywhere. And undertone of song pulsed far and near, The soaring larks filled heaven with ecstasies, And, like a living clock among the trees, The shouting cuckoo struck the time of year.
For now the Sun had found the earth once more, And woke the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss; Who thrilled with light of love in every pore, Opened her flower-blue eyes, and looked in his. Then all things felt life fluttering at their core-- The world shook mystical in lambent bliss.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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THE RED SUNSETS, 1883.
THE boding sky was charactered with cloud, The scripture of the storm--but high in air, Where the unfathomed zenith still was bare, A pure expanse of rose-flushed violet glowed And, kindling into crimson light, o'erflowed The hurrying wrack with such a blood-red glare, That heaven, igniting, wildly seemed to flare On the dazed eyes of many an awe-struck crowd.
And in far lands folk presaged with blanched lips Disastrous wars, earthquakes, and foundering ships, Such whelming floods as never dykes could stem, Or some proud empire's ruin and eclipse: Lo, such a sky, they cried, as burned o'er them Once lit the sacking of Jerusalem!
London_Girl
Age: 124
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THE RED SUNSETS, 1883.
THE twilight heavens are flushed with gathering light, And o'er wet roofs and huddling streets below Hang with a strange Apocalyptic glow On the black fringes of the wintry night. Such bursts of glory may have rapt the sight Of him to whom on Patmos long ago The visionary angel came to show That heavenly city built of chrysolite.
And lo, three factory hands begrimed with soot, Aflame with the red splendour, marvelling stand, And gaze with lifted faces awed and mute. Starved of earth's beauty by Man's grudging hand, O toilers, robbed of labour's golden fruit, Ye, too, may feast in Nature's fairyland.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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MANCHESTER BY NIGHT.
O'ER this huge town, rife with intestine wars, Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines Black brows majestical with glimmering stars. Her dewy silence soothes life's angry jars: And like a mother's wan white face, who pines Above her children's turbulent ways, so shines The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.
Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush Each other in the fateful strife for breath, And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath, Are swathed within the universal hush, As life exchanges semblances with death.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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TO THE OBELISK. DURING THE GREAT FROST, 1881.
THOU sign-post of the Desert! Obelisk, Once fronting in thy monumental pride Egypt's fierce sun, that blazing far and wide, Sheared her of tree and herb, till like a disk Her waste stretched shadowless, and fraught with risk To those who with their beasts of burden hied Across the seas of sand until they spied Thy pillar, and their flagging hearts grew brisk:
Now reared beside out Thames so wintry grey, Where blocks of ice drift with the drifting stream, Thou risest o'er the alien prospect! Say, Yon dull, blear, rayless orb whose lurid gleam Tinges the snow-draped ships and writhing steam, Is this the sun which fired thine orient day?
London_Girl
Age: 124
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THE AFTER-GLOW.
IT is a solemn evening, golden-clear-- The Alpine summits flame with rose-lit snow And headlands purpling on wide seas below, And clouds and woods and arid rocks appear Dissolving in the sun's own atmosphere And vast circumference of light, whose slow Transfiguration--glow and after-glow-- Turns twilight earth to a more luminous sphere.
Oh heart, I ask, seeing that the orb of day Has sunk below, yet left to sky and sea His glory's spiritual after-shine: I ask if Love, whose sun hath set for thee, May not touch grief with his memorial ray, And lend to loss itself a joy divine?
London_Girl
Age: 124
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MOTHERHOOD.
FROM out the front of being, undefiled, A life hath been upheaved with struggle and pain; Safe in her arms a mother holds again That dearest miracle--a new-born child. To moans of anguish terrible and wild-- As shrieks the night-wind through an ill-shut pane-- Pure heaven succeeds; and after fiery strain Victorious woman smiles serenely mild.
Yea, shall she not rejoice, shall not her frame Thrill with a mystic rapture! At this birth, The soul now kindled by her vital flame May it not prove a gift of priceless worth? Some saviour of his kind whose starry fame Shall bring a brightness to the darkened earth.
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
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HAUNTED STREETS.
LO, haply walking in some clattering street-- Where throngs of men and women dumbly pass, Like shifting pictures seen within a glass Which leave no trace behind--one seems to meet, In roads once trodden by our mutual feet, A face projected from that shadowy mass Of faces, quite familiar as it was, Which beaming on us stands out clear and sweet.
The face of faces we again behold That lit our life when life was very fair, And leaps our heart toward eyes and mouth and hair: Oblivious of the undying love grown cold, Or body sheeted in the churchyard mould, We stretch out yearning hands and grasp--the air
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
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SAVING LOVE.
WOULD we but love what will not pass away! The sun that on each morning shines as clear As when it rose first on the world's first year; The fresh green leaves that rustle on the spray. The sun will shine, the leaves will be as gay When graves are full of all our hearts held dear, When not a soul of those who loved us here, Not one, is left us--creatures of decay.
Yea, love the Abiding in the Universe Which was before, and will be after us. Nor yet for ever hanker and vainly cry For human love--the beings that change or die; Die--change--forget: to care so is a curse, Yet cursed we'll be rather than not care thus.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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TO MEMORY.
OH in this dearth and winter of the soul, When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing, Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall-- Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring One leaf, one blossom from that far-off spring When love's auroral light lay over all.
Bring but one pansy: haply so the thrill Of poignant yearning for those glad dead years May, like the gusty south, breathe o'er the chill Of frozen grief, dissolving it in tears, Till numb Hope, stirred by that warm dropping rain, Will deem, perchance, Love's springtide come again.
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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United Kingdom, United Kingdom
DESPAIR.
THY wings swoop darkening round my soul, Despair! And on my brain thy shadow seems to brood And hem me round with stifling solitude, With chasms of vacuous bloom which are thy lair. No light of human joy, no song or prayer, Breaks ever on this chaos, all imbrued With heart's-blood trickling from the multitude Of sweet hopes slain, or agonising there.
Lo, wilt thou yield thyself to grief, and roll Vanquished from thy high seat, imperial brain, And abdicating turbulent life's control, Be dragged a captive bound in sorrow's chain? Nay! though my heart is breaking with its pain, No pain on earth has power to crush my soul.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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DEAD LOVE.
MOTHER of the unfortunate, mystic form, Who calm, immutable, like oldest fate, Sittest, where through the sombre swinging gate Moans immemorial life's encircling storm. My heart, sore stricken by grief's leaden arm, Lags like a weary pilgrim knocking late, And sigheth--toward thee staggering with its weight-- Behold Love conquered by thy son, the worm!
He stung him mid the roses' purple bloom, The Rose of roses, yea, a thing so sweet, Haply to stay blind Change's flying feet, And stir with pity the unpitying tomb. Here, take him, cold, cold, heavy and void of breath! Nor me refuse, O Mother almighty, death.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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SLEEP.
LOVE-CRADLING Night, lit by the lucent moon, Most pitiful and mother-hearted Night! Blest armistice in life's tumultuous fight, Resolving discords to a spheral tune! When tired with heat and strenuous toil of noon, With ceaseless conflict betwixt might and right, With ebb and flow of sorrow and delight, Our panting hearts beneath their burdens swoon:
To thee, O star-eyes comforter, we creep, Earth's ill-used step-children to thee make moan, As hiding in thy dark skirts' ample sweep; --Poor debtors whose brief life is not their own; For dunned by Death, to whom we owe its loan, Give us, O Night, the interest paid in sleep.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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ANALKH.
LIKE a great rock which looming o'er the deep Casts his eternal shadow on the strands, And veiled in cloud inexorably stands, While vaulting round his adamantine steep Embattled breakers clamorously leap, Sun-garlanded and hope-uplifted bands, But soon with waters shattered in the sands Slowly recoiling back to ocean creep:
So sternly dost thou tower above us, Fate! For still our eager hearts exultant beat, Borne in the hurrying tide of life elate, And dashing break against thy marble feet. But would Hope's rainbow-aureole round us fleet, Without these hurtling shocks of man's estate?
London_Girl
Age: 124
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SUFFERING.
OH ye, all ye, who suffer here below, Schooled in the baffling mystery of pain, Who on life's anvil bear the fateful strain, Wrong as forged iron, hammered blow on blow. Take counsel with your grief, in that you know, That he who suffers suffers not in vain, Nay, that it shall be for the whole world's gain, And wisdom prove the priceless price of woe.
Thus in some new-found land where no man's feet Have trod a path, bold voyagers astray, May fall foredone by torturing thirst and heat: But from the impotent body of defeat-- The winners spring who carve a conquering way-- Measured by milestones of their perished clay.
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
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SYMBOL.
HURRYING for ever in their restless flight The generations of earth's teeming womb Rise into being and lapse into the tomb Like transient bubbles sparkling in the light; They sink in quick succession out of sight Into the thick insuperable gloom Our futile lives in flashing by illume-- Lightning which mocks the darkness of the night.
Nay--but consider, though we change and die, If men must pass shall Man not still remain? As the unnumbered drops of summer rain Whose changing particles unchanged on high, Fixed, in perpetual motion, yet maintain The mystic bow emblazoned on the sky.
London_Girl
Age: 124
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TIME'S SHADOW.
THY life, O Man, in this brief moment lies: Time's narrow bridge whereon we darkling stand, With an infinitude on either hand Receding luminously from our eyes. Lo, there thy Past's forsaken Paradise Subsideth like some visionary strand, While glimmering faint, the Future's promised land, Illusive from the abyss, seems fain to rise.
This hour alone Hope's broken pledges mar, And joy now gleams before, now in our rear, Like mirage mocking in some waste afar, Dissolving into air as we draw near. Beyond our steps the path is sunny-clear, The shadow lying only where we are
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
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THE DEAD.
THE dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still: They have forged our chains of being for good or ill; And their invisible hands these hands yet hold. Our perishable bodies are the mould In which their strong imperishable will-- Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil-- Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.
Vibrations infinite of life in death, As a star's travelling light survives its star! So may we hold our lives, that when we are The fate of those who then will draw this breath, They shall not drag us to their judgment bar, And curse the heritage which we bequeath
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
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HOPE.
ALL treasures of the earth and opulent seas, Metals and odorous woods and cunning gold, Fowls of the air and furry beasts untold, Vineyards and harvest fields and fruitful trees Nature gave unto Man; and last her keys Vouched passage to her secret ways of old Whence knowledge should be wrung, nay power to mould Out of the rough, his occult destinies.
But tired of these he craved a wider scope: Then fair as Pallas from the brain of Jove From his deep wish there sprang, full-armed, to cope With all life's ills, even very death in love, The only thing man never wearies of-- His own creation--visionary Hope.
London_Girl
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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CLEAVE THOU THE WAVES.
CLEAVE thou the waves that weltering to and fro Surge multitudinous. The eternal Powers Of sun, moon, stars, the air, the hurrying hours, The winged winds, the still dissolving show Of clouds in calm or storm, for ever flow Above thee; while the abysmal sea devours The untold dead insatiate, where it lowers O'er glooms unfathomed, limitless, below.
No longer on the golden-fretted sands, Where many a shallow tide abortive chafes, Mayst thou delay; life onward sweeping blends With far-off heaven: the dauntless one who braves The perilous flood with calm unswerving hands, The elements sustain: cleave thou the waves.
