Wintery Ocean

Afar the melancholy Thunder moaned,         Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais

Cold Pastoral

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth Eternity: Cold Pastoral! -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on a Grecian Urn

Silenced Song

We minded that the sharpest ear The buried brooklet could not hear, The music of whose liquid lip Had been to us companionship, And, in our lonely life, had grown To have an almost human tone. -John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892), Snow-Bound; A Winter Idyl

Stormy Visions

'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep         With phantoms an unprofitable strife,         And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife     Invulnerable nothings. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais

Struggle of Light and Darkness

In the death-chamber for a moment Death,         Shamed by the presence of that living Might,     Blushed to annihilation, and the breath         Revisited those lips, and life's pale light         Flashed through those limbs so late her dear delight. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais

Signal Light

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch Of the North Church tower as a signal light,-- -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), Paul Revere's Ride

Oblivious Vapor

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows:     My friends forsake me like a memory lost, I am the self-consumer of my woes--     They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes-- And yet I am, and live--like vapors tossed -John Clare (1793-1864), I am, written while he was confined in the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton, where he spent about the last third of his life.