Short Poems

The thresher Duck could o'er the Queen prevail.
The proverb says, 'No fence against a flail.'
From threshing corn, he turns to thresh his brains;
For which Her Majesty allows him grains.
Though 'tis confessed that those who ever saw
His poems, think them all not worth a straw.
Thrice happy Duck, employed in threshing stubble!
Thy toil is lessened, and thy profits double.

There sunken in deep woods they sang their song
And while they sang, the Kings of many lands
Strove to add land to land and field to field,
And earth was all a dust of driving bands;
And the Dutch broom and the British pennant strove
And the mad Swede sprawled out to smite the Pole
And the Czars and Sultans watched their aged rites
And never guessed a song could save a soul.

Most candid critic, what if I,
By way of joke, pull out your eye,
And holding up the fragment, cry,
'Ha! ha! that men such fools should be!
Behold this shapeless Dab!--and he
Who own'd it, fancied it could see!'
The joke were mighty analytic,
But should you like it, candid critic?

Sole Maid, associate sole, to me beyond
Compare, above all living Creatures Dear--

Thoughts which how found they harbour in thy Breast,
Sara misthoughts of him to thee so dear.

O women, kneeling by your altar-rails long hence,
When songs I wove for my beloved hide the prayer,
And smoke from this dead heart drifts through the violet air
And covers away the smoke of myrrh and frankincense;
Bend down and pray for all that sin I wove in song,
Till the Attorney for Lost Souls cry her sweet cry,
And call to my beloved and me: ‘No longer fly
Amid the hovering, piteous, penitential throng.&rsquo'

This pagoda penetrates the clouds;
its steps of stone go straight up, like a wall!
Terrified, I refuse to climb:
if only I had wings to lift me toward the sky!

The man of Tao—his iron flute plays music:
half enters the Tung-t'ing hills.
And wind from heaven blows the other half
over the white waters of Silver Bay.

Sun sets on Tung-t'ing's waves;
a Wu girl floats by in her boat.
The man of Tao plays his iron flute:
wind raises more waves with evening.

O that a chariot of cloud were mine
Of cloud which the wild tempest weaves in air,
When the moon over the ocean's line
Is spreading the locks of her bright gray hair.
O that a chariot of cloud were mine!
I would sail on the waves of the billowy wind
To the mountain peak and the rocky lake,

Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass
All that frail stuff which will be--or which was.