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First published 2007
Published in paperback in Penguin Classics 2008
Selection and editorial material copyright © Laura Barber, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on pages 368–75 constitute an extension of this copyright page
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
ISBN: 978-0-141-88979-5
Preface
A Note on the Poems
Birth and Beginnings
Sylvia Plath: Morning Song
William Blake: Infant Sorrow
Walter de la Mare: The Birthnight: To F.
Thomas Traherne: The Salutation
Anne Stevenson: The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Little bosom not yet cold’
E. E. Cummings: ‘from spiralling ecstatically this’
Anonymous: The Creation, from the Chester Cycle of the Mystery Plays
W. S. Merwin: Just This
Thomas Dekker: ‘Golden slumbers kiss your eyes’, from Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil, IV, ii
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Frost at Midnight
Walt Whitman: A Noiseless Patient Spider
Sylvia Plath: You’re
Percy Bysshe Shelley: To Ianthe
Thomas Hardy: Heredity
Ambrose Philips: To Miss Charlotte Pulteney, in her mother’s arms
Chinua Achebe: Generation Gap
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘There he lay upon his back’, from Aurora Leigh, Sixth Book
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring
William Blake: ‘The Angel that presided o’er my birth’
Childhood and Childish Things
Henry Vaughan: The Retreat
William Wordsworth: Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)
R. S. Thomas: Children’s Song
Ted Hughes: Full Moon and Little Frieda
Robert Louis Stevenson: Escape at Bedtime
Eugene Field: Dutch Lullaby
Walt Whitman: There Was a Child Went Forth
Anonymous: ‘What are little boys made of?’
Anonymous: ‘There was a little girl, who had a little curl’
Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky, from Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Thomas More: Childhood
A. A. Milne: The End
Winthrop Mackworth Praed: Childhood and His Visitors
Derek Mahon: Jardin du Luxembourg
William Barnes: Children
Spike Milligan: My Sister Laura
Louis Untermeyer: Portrait of a Child
George Eliot: from Brother and Sister: I
Olivia McCannon: Probability
Seamus Heaney: The Railway Children
Judith Wright: Legend
Frances Cornford: Childhood
Robert Graves: Warning to Children
Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Casabianca
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring and Fall (to a young child)
William Blake: The School Boy
John Clare: Schoolboys in Winter
Thomas Gray: Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
Gwen Harwood: Father and Child: I. Barn Owl
Alexander Pope: ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing’, from An Essay on Criticism
Edwin Muir: Childhood
Hugo Williams: Scratches
Patience Agbabi: North(west)ern
Carol Ann Duffy: In Mrs Tilscher’s Class
Growing Up and First Impressions
C. Day Lewis: Walking Away
William Barnes: Sister Gone
Andrew Young: Field-Glasses
Rudyard Kipling: If
Lewis Carroll: Rules and Regulations
Samuel Johnson: A Short Song of Congratulation
Lemn Sissay: Going Places
William Shakespeare: ‘To be, or not to be – that is the question’, from Hamlet, III, i
Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken
Thomas Hardy: ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’
John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
William Wordsworth: ‘O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!’, from The Prelude, Book XI (1850)
Ebenezer Jones: High Summer
Robert Wever: In Youth is Pleasure
Robert Herrick: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘Withinne the temple he wente hym forth pleyinge’, from Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
John Clare: First Love
Robert Graves: Love Without Hope
Elizabeth Daryush: Still-life
Aphra Behn: ‘When Maidens are young and in their Spring’, from The Emperor of the Moon, II, v
Charles Turner: A Country Dance
Kirsty Gunn: Mataatua
George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘Young Juan wandered by the glassy brooks’, from Don Juan, Canto I: XC–XCIII
Adrian Mitchell: A Puppy Called Puberty
Sasha Dugdale: First Love
Togara Muzanenhamo: Smoke
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: ‘An upper chamber in a darkened house’
Christopher Marlowe: ‘By this, sad Hero, with love unacquainted’, from Hero and Leander, Sestiad II
Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
John Keats: ‘They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve’, from The Eve of St Agnes: VI–IX, XXII–XXXVI
D. H. Lawrence: Green
E. E. Cummings: ‘i like my body when it is with your’
Christina G. Rossetti: A Birthday
Walt Whitman: We Two Boys together Clinging
A. E. Housman: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, from A Shropshire Lad: II
Louis MacNeice: Apple Blossom
Making a Living and Making Love
Sir Henry Wotton: The Character of a Happy Life
Ben Jonson: ‘Come on, sir. Now you set your foot on shore’, from The Alchemist, II, i
John Davidson: Thirty Bob a Week
Theodore Roethke: Dolor
Thomas Hood: The Song of the Shirt
Linton Kwesi Johnson: More Time
Philip Larkin: Toads
William Wordsworth: ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon’
Carol Ann Duffy: Mrs Sisyphus
Derek Walcott: Ebb
Arthur Clough: ‘Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Work Without Hope
John Milton: ‘Now came still ev’ning on, and twilight grey’, from Paradise Lost, Book IV
W. H. Davies: Leisure
Louis MacNeice: Meeting Point
Richard Barnfield: ‘Sighing, and sadly sitting by my Love’
Ben Okri: I Held You in the Square
Thomas Moore: Did Not
Fleur Adcock: Against Coupling
Ogden Nash: Reflections on Ice-Breaking
Edmund Waller: To Phillis
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: [A Summary of Lord Lyttleton’s ‘Advice to a lady’]
Kim Addonizio: For Desire
Robert Herrick: Delight in Disorder
Christopher Marlowe: Elegia V: Corinnae concubitus, from Ovid’s Elegies, Book I
Charles Simic: Crazy about Her Shrimp
Emily Dickinson: ‘Wild Nights – Wild Nights!’
John Donne: The Ecstasy
David Constantine: ‘As our Bloods Separate’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’, from The Princess
Arthur Symons: White Heliotrope
Robert Browning: Two in the Campagna
Lemn Sissay: Love Poem
Family Life, for Better, for Worse
Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Edwin Muir: The Confirmation
John Betjeman: The Subaltern’s Love-song
William Blake: ‘Hail Matrimony, made of Love!’, from An Island in the Moon
Edmund Spenser: ‘Ye gentle Birds, the world’s fair ornament’, from Prothalamion
Edward Lear: The Owl and the Pussy-cat
Carmen Bugan: A house of stone
William Shakespeare: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’, Sonnet 116
Sir Philip Sidney: ‘My true-love hath my hart, and I have his’, from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
Carol Ann Duffy: White Writing
Dick Davis: Uxor Vivamus…
Abraham Cowley: The Wish
Philip Larkin: This Be The Verse
Adrian Mitchell: This Be the Worst
Maura Dooley: Freight
Mark Strand: ‘The Dreadful Has Already Happened’
William Wordsworth: ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’
Robert Burns: A Poet’s Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father
Stephen Spender: To My Daughter
James Joyce: On the Beach at Fontana
Gwen Harwood: In the Park
Coventry Patmore: The Toys
Charles Lamb: Parental Recollections
Fleur Adcock: For a Five-year-old
Robin Robertson: New Gravity
Ben Jonson: On My First Son
Peggy Carr: Flight of the Firstborn
Anne Bradstreet: In Reference to Her Children, 23 June, 1659
William Carlos Williams: Dance Russe
Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves’
Michael Ondaatje: The Strange Case
David Constantine: Don’t jump off the roof, Dad…
Robert Browning: Love in a Life
Robert Crawford: Home
Grace Nichols: Like a Beacon
A. K. Ramanujan: Self-Portrait
Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays
Dilip Chitre: Father Returning Home
Vincent Buckley: from Stroke, VII
Elizabeth Jennings: One Flesh
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: The Unequal Fetters
Charlotte Mew: The Farmer’s Bride
Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘Now sire, thanne wol I telle yow forth my tale’, from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales
William Shakespeare: ‘Too hot, too hot!’, from The Winter’s Tale, I, ii
George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘’Tis melancholy and a fearful sign’, from Don Juan, Canto III: V–VIII
Ezra Pound: The Bath Tub
John Milton: ‘They sat them down to weep, nor only tears’, from Paradise Lost, Book IX
George Meredith: ‘At dinner she is hostess, I am host’, from Modern Love: XVII
Patience Agbabi: Accidentally Falling
Ernest Dowson: Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
John Dryden: ‘Why should a foolish Marriage Vow’, from Marriage A-La-Mode, I, i
Michael Drayton: ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’
Sir Thomas Wyatt: ‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek’
Nick Laird: To The Wife
D. H. Lawrence: Trust
William Shakespeare: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, Sonnet 18
Douglas Dunn: Modern Love
Seamus Heaney: The Skunk
Thom Gunn: The Hug
Anne Bradstreet: To My Dear and Loving Husband
George Crabbe: ‘The ring so worn, as you behold’
Dom Moraes: Future Plans
John Donne: Love’s Growth
Getting Older, Looking Back
Alison Fell: Pushing forty
John Keats: To Autumn
Andrew Marvell: The Garden
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: ‘As when down some broad river dropping, we’
Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
John Clare: ‘I Am’
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Mezzo Cammin
Philip Larkin: The Old Fools
Charles Simic: Grayheaded Schoolchildren
Robert Southey: The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them
Lewis Carroll: ‘ “You are old, Father William,” the young man said’, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Terminus
W. B. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium
Carole Satyamurti: Day Trip
Jenny Joseph: Warning
Wole Soyinka: To My First White Hairs
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses
Sir Henry Lee: ‘His Golden locks, Time hath to Silver turn’d’
John Milton: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’
George Herbert: The Forerunners
William Wordsworth: Old Man Travelling. Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch
James Henry: Very Old Man
Edward Thomas: Old Man
Matthew Arnold: Growing Old
Stephen Spender: ‘What I expected, was’
T. E. Hulme: The Embankment
Ernest Dowson: Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam
W. B. Yeats: When You are Old
Stevie Smith: Pad, pad
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: A Song of a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover
Leigh Hunt: Rondeau
William Shakespeare: ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’, Sonnet 73
Robert Burns: John Anderson My Jo
George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’
Thomas Moore: ‘Oft, in the stilly night’
Edward Thomas: Adlestrop
Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Vision of Spring in Winter
Thomas Hood: I Remember, I Remember
D. H. Lawrence: Piano
William Shakespeare: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’, Sonnet 30
James Henry: ‘Another and another and another’
Intimations of Mortality
Mark Strand: A Morning
Edmund Blunden: The Midnight Skaters
Edna St Vincent Millay: Dirge Without Music
Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night
Christopher Marlowe: ‘Ah, Faustus,/Now hast thou but one bare hour to live’, from Doctor Faustus, scene xiv
Wilfred Owen: Futility
Henry Vaughan: ‘They are all gone into the world of light!’
Walter Savage Landor: Age
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Tithonus
Emily Dickinson: ‘Because I could not stop for Death –’
Sir Walter Ralegh: A Farewell to Court
Thomas Campion: ‘Never weather-beaten Sail more willing bent to shore’
Alexander Pope: The Dying Christian to His Soul
John Donne: ‘Death be not proud, though some have called thee’
William Shakespeare: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun’, from Cymbeline, IV, ii
Emily Brontë: ‘No coward soul is mine’
George Eliot: ‘O may I join the choir invisible’
Rupert Brooke: The Soldier
Julia Alvarez: Last Trees
Louis MacNeice: The Sunlight on the Garden
Thomas Hardy: Afterwards
Christina G. Rossetti: Remember
D. H. Lawrence: Bavarian Gentians
Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne: The Land o’ the Leal
Katherine, Lady Dyer: [Epitaph on Sir William Dyer]
Charles Causley: Eden Rock
Edmund Waller: Of the Last Verses in the Book
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar
Alden Nowlan: This Is What I Wanted to Sign Off With
Walter Savage Landor: ‘Death stands above me, whispering low’
Raymond Carver: Late Fragment
Mourning and Monuments
W. H. Auden: Funeral Blues
Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’, from In Memoriam A. H. H.: VII
Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Grief
Ivor Gurney: To His Love
Douglas Dunn: The Kaleidoscope
Edna St Vincent Millay: ‘Time does not bring relief; you all have lied’
William Wordsworth: ‘Surprized by joy – impatient as the Wind’
Thomas Hardy: After a Journey
Anonymous: The Unquiet Grave
Emily Brontë: Remembrance
R. S. Thomas: Comparisons
Emily Dickinson: ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes –’
Thom Gunn: The Reassurance
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘I envy not in any moods’, from In Memoriam A. H. H.: XXVII
William Johnson Cory: Heraclitus
Dylan Thomas: And death shall have no dominion
Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep –’, from Adonais
Robert Browning: My Last Duchess
Ezra Pound: Epitaphs
Wallace Stevens: A Postcard from the Volcano
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard
Stephen Spender: ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’
Thomas Hardy: Transformations
Walt Whitman: ‘A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands’, from Song of Myself
Philip Larkin: An Arundel Tomb
Edwin Morgan: Message Clear
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
My mother groan’d, my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swaddling-bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss:
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
Thou, lovely thing.
These little Limbs,
These Eyes and Hands which here I find.
These rosy Cheeks wherewith my Life begins,
Where have ye been? Behind
What Curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what Abyss, my speaking Tongue?
When silent I,
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the Dust did in a Chaos lie,
How could I Smiles or Tears,
Or Lips or Hands or Eyes or Ears perceive?
Welcome ye Treasures which I now receive.
I that so long
Was Nothing from Eternity,
Did little think such Joys as Ear or Tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet,
Beneath the Skies, on such a Ground to meet.
New burnished Joys!
Which yellow Gold and Pearls excel!
Such sacred Treasures are the Limbs in Boys,
In which a Soul doth Dwell;
Their organized Joints and azure Veins
More Wealth include than all the World contains.
From Dust I rise,
And out of Nothing now awake;
These brighter Regions which salute mine Eyes,
A Gift from God I take.
The Earth, the Seas, the Light, the Day, the Skies,
The Sun and Stars are mine, if those I prize.
Long time before
I in my mother’s Womb was born,
A God preparing did this Glorious Store,
The World, for me adorn.
Into this Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His Son and Heir.
A Stranger here
Strange Things doth meet, strange Glories see;
Strange Treasures lodg’d in this fair World appear,
Strange all, and new to me;
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That Strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.
The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae
in the chain of the difficult spine.
Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to the minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.
Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No. No desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body’s ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.
Little bosom not yet cold,
Noble forehead made for thought,
Little hands of mighty mould
Clenched as in the fight which they had fought.
He had done battle to be born,
But some brute force of Nature had prevailed
And the little warrior failed.
Whate’er thou wert, whate’er thou art,
Whose life was ended ere thy breath begun,
Thou nine-months neighbour of my dear one’s heart,
And howsoe’er thou liest blind and mute,
Thou lookest bold and resolute,
God bless thee dearest son.
from spiralling ecstatically this
proud nowhere of earth’s most prodigious night
blossoms a newborn babe:around him, eyes
– gifted with every keener appetite
than mere unmiracle can quite appease –
humbly in their imagined bodies kneel
(over time space doom dream while floats the whole
perhapsless mystery of paradise)
mind without soul may blast some universe
to might have been, and stop ten thousand stars
but not one heartbeat of this child;nor shall
even prevail a million questionings
against the silence of his mother’s smile
– whose only secret all creation sings
The Creation
DEUS:
I, God, most in maiestye,
In whom beginning none may be,
Endles as most of postye,
I am and have bene ever.
Now heaven and earth is made through me:
The earthe is voyde onely I see,
Therefore light for more lee,
Through my crafte I will kever.
At my bydding now made be light!
Light is good, I see in sighte;
Twynned shalbe throughe my mighte
The lighte from thesternes.
Light daye I will be called aye,
And thesternes night, as I say;
Thus morrow and even the first day
Is made full and expresse.
Now will I make the fyrmament
In myddes the waters to be lent,
For to be a divident,
To twyne the waters aye;
Above the welkin, benethe also,
And heaven yt shall be called oo;
Thus commen is even and morrow also
Of the seacond daye.
postye power; lee brightness; kever gain; Twynned divided; thesternes darkness; aye ever; expresse complete; fyrmament sky; myddes midst; lent placed; welkin sky; oo always; even evening
Now will I waters everichone,
That under heaven be great won,
That they [gather] into one,
And drynes sone him showe.
That drynes earth men shall call;
The gathering of the waters all,
Seas to name have the shall,
Thereby men shall [them] knowe.
I will on earth that hearbes springe,
Each one in kinde seede gevinge,
Trees dyvers fruytes forth bringe,
After there kinde eache one,
The seede of which for aye shall be
Within the fruyte of each tree;
Thus morrow and even of dayes three
Is bothe comen and gone.
Now will I make through my might
Lightninge in the welken brighte,
To twyn the day from the nighte,
And lighten the earthe with lee.
Greate lightes also I will make twoo,
The sonne and eke the mone also;
The sonne for daye to serve for oo,
The mone for nighte to be.
I will make on the fyrmament
Starres also, throughe myne intent;
The earth to lighten there they be sent,
And knowne may be there-bye
Cowrses of planetts nothing amisse.
Now se I this worke good, i-wisse;
Thus morrow and even both made is
The fourthe daye fully.
won existence; sone soon; hearbes plants; kinde nature; dyvers diverse; Cowrses courses; i-wisse indeed
Now will I in waters fishe forth bringe,
Fowles in the firmament flyinge,
Great whalles in the sea swymminge;
All make I with a thoughte.
Beastes, fowles, stone and tree,
These workes are good, well I see,
Therfore to blesse all lykes me
These workes that I have wroughte.
All beastes I byd yow multeply
In earth, in water, by and bye,
And fowles in ayre for to flye
The earth to fulfill.
Thus morrow and even, through my might,
Of the fifte daye and the night
Is made and ended well arighte,
All at myne owne will.
Now will I on earth forth bringe anone
All kindes of beastes, everichon,
That creepen, flye, or els gone,
Each one in his kinde.
Now is done all my biddinge,
Beastes going, flyinge and creeping,
And all my workes at my lyking
Fully now I finde.
Now heaven and earth is made expresse,
Make we man to our lyckenes;
Fishe, foule, beastes, more and lesse
To maister he shall have might.
To our shape now make I thee;
Man and woman I will ther be.
Growe and multeply shall ye
And fulfill earth in height.
lykes pleases
To helpe thee, thou shalt have here
Hearbes, trees, sede, fruite in feare;
All shalbe put in thy power,
And beastes eke also,
All that in earth be sterring,
Fowles in the ayer flying,
And all that ghoste hath and lyking,
To sustayne yow from woe.
Now this is done, I see aright,
And all thinges made through my might,
The sixte daye here in my sight
Is made all of the beste.
Heaven and earth is wrought within,
And all that needes to be therin;
To-morrow, the seventh day, I will blyn,
And of worke take my reste.
feare company; sterring stirring; ayer air; ghoste spirit; blyn stop
When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Care is heavy, therefore sleep you,
You are care and care must keep you.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud – and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.