love poem

The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing,
Flatters our hope and tickles our desire,
Nature's true riches in sweet beauties showing,
Which set all hearts, with labour's love, on fire.
No less fair is the wheat when golden ear
Shows unto hope the joys of near enjoying:
Fair and sweet is the bud, more sweet and fair
The rose, which proves that time is not destroying.
Caelica, your youth, the morning of delight,
Enamelled o'er with beauties white and red,
All sense and thoughts did to belief invite,

Fie, foolish earth, think you the heaven wants glory
Because your shadows do yourself benight?
All's dark unto the blind, let them be sorry;
The heavens in themselves are ever bright.

Fie, fond desire, think you that love wants glory
Because your shadows do yourself benight?
The hopes and fears of lust may make men sorry,
But love still in herself finds her delight.

Then earth, stand fast, the sky that you benight
Will turn again and so restore your glory;
Desire, be steady, hope is your delight,

You little stars that live in skies
And glory in Apollo's glory,
In whose aspects conjoined lies,
The heaven's will and nature's story,
Joy to be likened to those eyes,
Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry;
For when you force thoughts from above,
These overrule your force by love.

And thou, O Love, which in these eyes
Hast married Reason with Affection,
And made them saints of Beauty's skies,
Where joys are shadows of perfection,
Lend me thy wings that I may rise
Up, not by worth, but thy election;

But into order falls our life at last,
Though in the retrospection jarred and blent.
Broken ambition, love misplaced or spent
Too soon, and slander busy with the past:
Sorrows too sweet to lose, or vexing joy.
But Time will bring oblivion of annoy,
And Silence bind the blows that words have lent;
And we will dwell, unheeding Love or Fame
Like him who has outlived a shining Name:
And Peace will come, as evening comes to him,
No leader now of men, no longer proud
But poor and private, watching the sun's rim;

O rest divine! O golden certainty
Of love! when love's half smile, illumining pain,
Bade all bright things immutable remain.
Dreaming I stand, the low brook drawling by,
Her flowerlike mien, her mountain step to mark.
Ah, I recall when her least look again
Could mar the music in my happy mind
And plunge me into doubt, her faintest sigh
Stir all the fixed pillars of my heaven,
Commingling them in mist and stormy dark!
And all together, as I have seen the rain
When the whole shower is swinging in the wind,

O hard endeavor, to blend in with these
Dark shadings of the past a darker grief
Or blur with stranger woes a wound so chief,
Though the great world turn slow with agonies.
What though the forest windflowers fell and died
And Gertrude sleeps at Gulielma's side?
They have their tears, nor turn to us their eyes:
But we pursue our dead with groans and cries
And bitter reclamations to the term
Of undiscerning darkness and the worm;
Then sit in silence down and darkly dwell
Through the slow years on all we loved, and tell

Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.

And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.

As on a window late I cast mine eye,
I saw a vine drop grapes with J and C
Annealed on every bunch. One standing by
Asked what it meant. I (who am never loath
To spend my judgement) said, It seemed to me
To be the body and the letters both
Of Joy and Charity . Sir, you have not missed,
The man replied; it figures JESUS CHRIST .

A SCEND , my Muse, on sorrow's sable plume,
Let the soft number meet the swelling sigh;
With laureated chaplets deck the tomb,
The blood-stained tomb where Smith and comfort lie.

I loved him with a brother's ardent love,
Beyond the love which tenderest brothers bear;
Though savage kindred bosoms cannot move,
Friendship shall deck his urn and pay the tear.

Despised, an alien to thy father's breast,
Thy ready services repaid with hate;
By brother, father, sisters, all distressed,

H ERRICK and H ORACE Rewrite the Latter's 22nd Ode, Book I.

Fuscus, dear friend,
I prithee lend
An ear for but a space,
And thou shalt see
How Love may be
A more than saving grace.

As on a day
I chanced to stray
Beyond my own confines
Singing, perdie,
Of Lalage
Whose smile no star outshines —