6. Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change; Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange : Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings The Gods are hard to reconcile : Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. 7. But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) With half-dropt eyelids still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine— 8. The Lotos blooms below the barren peak : All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone : Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos dust is blown. We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foamfountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, shore Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN. I READ, before my eyelids dropt their shade, Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still. And, for a while, the knowledge of his art Charged both mine eyes with tears. In every land I saw, wherever light illumineth, Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand. The downward slope to death. Those far-renowned brides of ancient song Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars, And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong, And trumpets blown for wars; And clattering flints batter'd with clanging hoofs: Corpses across the threshold; heroes tall And high shrine-doors burst thro' with heated blasts Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates, So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way, Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand, |