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III

LYRICAL POEMS

If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy
(Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit);
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,-
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the

least,

Which into words no virtue can digest.

-CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

61

THE POET1

Na poet's lips I slept

ON

Dreaming like a love-adept

In the sound his breathing kept;

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aërial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be;
But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

62

B

ARDS of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new?
Yes, and those of heaven commune
With the spheres of sun and moon;
With the noise of fountains wond'rous,
And the parle of voices thund'rous;
With the whisper of heaven's trees
And one another, in soft ease
Seated on Elysian lawns

Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;

1 Spoken by a "spirit" in Prometheus Unbound.

Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.

Thus ye live on high, and then

On the earth ye live again;

And the souls ye left behind you
Teach us, here, the way to find you,
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumbered, never cloying.
Here, your earth-born souls still speak
To mortals, of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;
Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;
What doth strengthen and what maim.
Thus ye teach us, every day,
Wisdom, though fled far away.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new!

John Keats

E are the music-makers,

WE

And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown:
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur W. E. O'Shaughnessy

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