Yes, it was the mountain Echo

William Wordsworth



YES, it was the mountain Echo,

Solitary, clear, profound,

Answering to the shouting Cuckoo,

Giving to her sound for sound!



Unsolicited reply

To a babbling wanderer sent;

Like her ordinary cry,

Like--but oh, how different!



Hears not also mortal Life?

Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!

Slaves of folly, love, or strife--

Voices of two different natures?



Have not 'we' too?--yes, we have

Answers, and we know not whence;

Echoes from beyond the grave,

Recognised intelligence!



Such rebounds our inward ear

Catches sometimes from afar--

Listen, ponder, hold them dear;

For the God --of God they are.

The Stars are Mansions Built by Nature's Hand

William Wordsworth



 



THE stars are mansions built by Nature's hand,

And, haply, there the spirits of the blest

Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest;

Huge Ocean shows, within his yellow strand,

A habitation marvellously planned,

For life to occupy in love and rest;

All that we see--is dome, or vault, or nest,

Or fortress, reared at Nature's sage command.

Glad thought for every season! but the Spring

Gave it while cares were weighing on my heart,

'Mid song of birds, and insects murmuring;

And while the youthful year's prolific art--

Of bud, leaf, blade, and flower--was fashioning

Abodes where self-disturbance hath no part.

As I Ponder'd In Silence

Walt Whitman



 



As I ponder'd in silence,

Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,

A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,

Terrible in beauty, age, and power,

The genius of poets of old lands,

As to me directing like flame its eyes,

With finger pointing to many immortal songs,

And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,

Know'st thou not there is hut one theme for ever-enduring bards?

And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,

The making of perfect soldiers. 



Be it so, then I answer'd,

I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,

Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance

    and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,

(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the

    field the world,

For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,

Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,

I above all promote brave soldiers.

How Do I Love Thee

Elizabeth Barrett Browning



How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death. 

  SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE III

              

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! 

     Unlike our uses and our destinies. 

     Our ministering two angels look surprise 

     On one another, as they strike athwart 

Their wings in passing.  Thou, bethink thee, art 

     A guest for queens to social pageantries, 

     With gages from a hundred brighter eyes 

     Than tears even can make mine, to ply thy part 

Of chief musician.  What hast thou to do 

     With looking from the lattice-lights at me, 

     A poor, tired, wandering singer,... singing through 

The dark, and leaning up a cypress-tree? 

     The chrism is on thine head, — on mine, the dew, — 

     And Death must dig the level where these agree.

 

 SONETOS PORTUGUÊSES, III  

Parte:  não te separas! Que jamais 

     Sairei de tua sombra. Por distante 

     Que te vás, em meu peito, a cada instante 

     Juntos dois corações batem iguais. 

Não ficarei mais só. Nem nunca mais 

     Dona de mim, a mão, quando a levante 

     Deixará de sentir o toque amante 

     Da tua, — ao que fugi. Parte: não sais! 

Como o vinho, que às uvas donde flui 

     Deve saber, é quanto faço e quanto 

    Sonho, que assim também todo te inclui 

A ti, amor! minha outra vida, pois 

    Quando oro a Deus, teu nome ele ouve e o pranto 

    Em meus olhos são lágrimas de dois. 

Sonnet XV from Sonnets From the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning



Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear

Too calm and sad a face in front of thine;

For we two look two ways, and cannot shine

With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.

On me thou lookest with no doubting care,

As on a bee in a crystalline;

Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love's divine

And to spread wing and fly in the outer air

Were most impossible failure, if I strove

To fail so.  But I look on thee--on thee--

Beholding, besides love, the end of love,

Hearing oblivion beyond memory;

As one who sits and gazes from above,

Over the rivers to the bitter sea.

Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year

John Keats







Four seasons fill the measure of the year;

   There are four seasons in the mind of man:          

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

   Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously

    Spring's honey'd cud of youthful thought he loves

To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

    Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings

    He furleth close; contented so to look

On mists in idleness- to let fair things

     Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,

    Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

  





 

From Song of Myself

Walt Whitman



1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. 


My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their

parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death. 

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy. 


2

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with

perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. 


The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the

distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me. 

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing

of blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and

dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, 


The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of

the wind,

A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields

and hill-sides,

The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising

from bed and meeting the sun. 


Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 


Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of

all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions

of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through

the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.