Wessex Poems, and Other Verses: Poems of the Past and the Present

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Macmillan, 1908 - 490 pages
 

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Page 401 - An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for...
Page 155 - Ledlow late at plough, Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now! 'Gone,' I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads; Yet at mothy curfew-tide. And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads, They've a way of whispering to me - fellow-wight who yet abide In the muted, measured note Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide...
Page 182 - tis but yon dark And wind-swept pine to me ! " Yet I would bear my shortcomings With meet tranquillity, But for the charge that blessed things I'd liefer not have be. O, doth a bird deprived of wings Go earth-bound wilfully ! Enough.
Page 399 - THE DARKLING THRUSH I LEANT upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.
Page 18 - God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; — They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Page 250 - Young Hodge the Drummer never knew— Fresh from his Wessex home — The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.
Page 7 - IF but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!" Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? — Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for...
Page 149 - As evening shaped I found me on a moor Sight shunned to entertain: The black lean land, of featureless contour, Was like a tract in pain. 'This scene, like my own life...
Page 60 - It was just at the instant when the latter, who had thrown his mind into his song with such a will that he scarcely heeded the interruption, silenced all whispers and inquiries by bursting into his third...
Page 343 - Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot Of earth's wide wold for thee, where not One tear, one qualm, Should break the calm. But I am weak as thou and bare; No man can change the common lot to rare.

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