Poems

The sound is in my ears of mountain streams! I cannot close my lids but some grey rent Of wildered rock, some water’s clear descent In shattering crystal, pine-trees soft as dre...

I spin, I spin, around, around, And close my eyes, And let the bile arise From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound; Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new! The eart...

Below me spreads a sea of tranquil light, No blue cloud thunder-laden, but pure air Shot through and through with sunshine; from this height A man might cast himself in joy’s de...

Wherefore record the travail of the soul Through darkness to grey light, the cloudy war, The austere calm, the bitter victory? It seemed that I had mastered fate, and held, Stil...

Yet, strangely enough, between his politics and his poetry there was a water-tight wall of separation. Other men, to take scattered instances, Kipling, Wordsworth, Milton, fused...

The grass around my limbs is deep and sweet; Yonder the house has lost its shadow wholly, The blinds are dropped, and softly now and slowly The day flows in and floats; a calm r...

Here some time flowed my springs and sent a cry Of joy before them up the shining air, While morn was new, and heaven all blue and bare; Here dipped the swallow to a tenderer sk...

Who dared to pluck the sleeve of Hannibal, And hale him from the shades? Who bade the man, Indomitable of brain, return to plan A vast revenge and vowed? Wild clarions call; Dus...

Goethe says in a little poem[A] that “Poems are stained glass windows”--“_Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben_”--to be seen aright not from the “market-place” but only from th...

Ah, without stop or stay the ship still momently presses On through the foaming deep, further and further from shore. Far-traced the furrow is cut by the keel, and in it the dol...