Short Poems

Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of man.

“Your horses of the Sun,” he said,
“And first-rate whip Apollo!
Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head,
But I will beat them hollow.”

A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love.

Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence;
Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
May languish with the scurvy.

The clerkly person smiled and said,
Promise was a pretty maid,
But being poor she died unwed.

How oft have we beheld wilde Beasts appear
From broken gulfs of earth, upon some part
Of sand that did not sink? How often there
And thence did golden boughs ore saffron'd start?
Not only saw we monsters of the wood,
But I have seen Sea-Calves whom Bears withstood;
And such a kinde of Beast as might be named
A horse, but in most foul proportion framed.

——Quoties nos descendentis Arenæ
Vidimus in partes, ruptâ voragine terræ
Emersisse feras & iisdem sæpe latebris
Aurea cum Croceo creverunt Arbuta libro?
Nec solum nobis Sylvestria cernere monstra
Contigit, Æquoreos ego cum certantibus Ursis
Spectavi vitulos & equorum nomine dignum
Sed deforme pecus——

O for a pair like turtles wear,
O wings my spirit could put on!
And where I see the sweet cross-tree
In instant time I would be gone.

Here I'm gazing, wide awake,
Robert Browning, no mistake!

'Twas Goethe taught us all
By diagnosis,
That change in plants we call
Metamorphosis!