And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.
-Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849),
The Haunted Palace
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Voiceless Fountain
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, And feeds her grief with his rememberd lay; And will no more reply to winds or fountains, Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day; -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Silent Leap
Than Oars divide the Ocean,-- Too silver for a seam-- Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon Leap, plashless as they swim. -Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), A Bird came down the Walk |
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Fleeting Hope
Till I scarecely more than muttered "Other friends have flown
before-- One the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before." -Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), The Raven |
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Fainting Soul
O love, they die in you rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river; Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. -Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), The Splendor Falls |
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Weeping Cloud
But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on Melancholy |
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Idle Tears
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. -Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), Tears, Idle Tears |
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Murmur
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear Than those for whose disdain she pined away Into a shadow of all sounds:--a drear Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Beauty and the Beast
Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. -William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), Sailing to Byzantium |
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Distant Maiden
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or
devil!-- By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore-- Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-- Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the raven, "Nevermore." -Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), The Raven |
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Pensive Stream
And leaning backward in a pensive dream, And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers Plucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream. -Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), The Scholar-Gipsy |
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Leaf-Fringed Legend
Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend hanunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on a Grecian Urn |
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Fire-Lit Face
O Time and Change!---with hair as gray As my sire's that winter day, How strange it seems, with so much gone Of life and love, to still live on! Ah, brother! only I and thou Are left of all that circle now,-- The dear home faces whereupon That fitful firelight paled and shone. -John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892), Snow-Bound; A Winter Idyl |
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Second Coming
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), The Second Coming |
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Slant of Light
When it comes, the Landscape listens-- Shadows--hold their breath-- When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death-- -Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), There's a certain Slant of light |
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Shrine of Melancholy
She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on Melancholy |
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Moonlight Vapor
the damp death Quenched its caress upon his icy lips, And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath Of moonlight vapour which the cold night clips, It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Starry Night
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out, Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand-- Come, long-sought! -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), To Night |
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Falling Stars
Go and catch a falling star -John Donne (1572-1631), Go and Catch a Falling Star |
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Ghosts and Shadows
By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summon'd am to a tourney Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end: Methinks it is no journey. -Anonymous (c.1400 - c.1600), Tom o' Bedlam's Song |
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Hope
Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress-trees! Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across the mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of Death, And Love can never lose its own! -John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892), Snow-Bound; A Winter Idyl |
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Caress
Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicéan barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, That weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. -Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), To Helen |
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Dark Valley
And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh--but smile no more. -Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), The Haunted Palace |
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Beauty and the Beast
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save
thee; Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters wasted them while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou; Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play, Time writes no wrinkles on thine azure brow; Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now. -George Gordon Noel Byron 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), The Ocean |
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Pulsating Heart
And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? -William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Leda and the Swan |
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Summer Dreams
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do When hearts are light and life is new; Faint and more faint the murmurs grew, Till in the summer-land of dreams They softened to the sound of streams, Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars, And lapsing waves on quiet shores. -John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892), Snow-Bound; A Winter Idyl |
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Mysterious Path
We tread the paths their feet have worn, We sit beneath their orchard trees, We hear, like them, the hum of bees And rustle of the bladed corn; We turn the pages that they read, Their written words we linger o'er, But in the sun they cast no shade, No voice is heard, no sign is made, No step is on the conscious floor! -John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892), Snow-Bound; A Winter Idyl |
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Dissolving Memory
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode to a Nightingale |
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Eternal Note
Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. -Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Dover Beach |
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Quiet Waves
Here life has death for neighbour, And far from eye or ear Wan waves and wet winds labour, Weak ships and spirits steer; They drive adrift, and whither They wot not who make thither; But no such winds blow hither, And no such things grow here. -Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), The Garden of Proserpine |
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Days End
Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. -Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), Break, Break, Break |
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Evening Bed
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. -Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894), Up-Hill |
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Night Wind
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. -Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Dover Beach |
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Lead Kindly Light
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; Lead thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me. -John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801 - 1890), The Pillar of Cloud (1833). Lead Kindly Light |
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Soul Searching
The Soul selects her own Society-- Then--shuts the Door-- To her divine Majority-- Present no more-- Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing-- At her low Gate-- Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling Upon her Mat-- I've known her--from an ample nation-- Choose One-- Then--close the Valves of her attention-- Like Stone-- -Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), The Soul selects her own Society |
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Light and Gloom
And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind. -William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), A Prayer for My Daughter |
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Hope and Despair
My life closed twice before its close-- It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. -Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), My life closed twice before its close |
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Sleepy World
Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams. -Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), The Garden of Proserpine |
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Mysterious Light
There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons-- That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes-- -Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), There's a certain Slant of light |
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Forbidden Hopes
Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the
streams: Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams, A throe of the heart, Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound, No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound, For all our art. -Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Nightingales |
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Dream Tears
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead! See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some dream has loosened from his brain." -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Weeping Rock
Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw The wreath upon him, like an anadem Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem; -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Faint Words
The water hears thy faintest word, And blushes into wine. -John Samuel Bewley Monsell (1811 - 1875), Mysterious Is Thy Presence, Lord |
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Glittering Sail
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. -Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), Tears, Idle Tears |
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Noonday Dew
And a light spear topped with a cypress-cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart Shook the weak hand that grasped it. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Blind with Tears
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,-- Came in slow pomp;--the moving pomp might seem Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Twinkle
Hear the
sledges with the bells-- Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells,-- From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. -Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), The Bells |
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Sunshine Rain
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day; Blissfully havened both from joy and pain; Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray; Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. -John Keats (1795-1821), The Eve of St. Agnes |
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Veils of Morning
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. -William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), The Lake Isle of Innisfree |
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Light and Shadow
Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanish'd gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Brahma |
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A Stir in the Air
But lo, a stir is in the air! The wave--there is a movement there! As if the towers had thrust aside, In slightly sinking, the dull tide-- As if their tops had feebly given A void within the filmy Heaven. The waves have now a redder glow-- The hours are breathing faint and low-- And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence. -Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), The City in the Sea |
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Evening Sail
It is time to be old, To take in sail. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Terminus |
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Shadowy Twin
Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything Prepared a sinister mate For her--so gaily great-- A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, -Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), The Convergence of the Twain |
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Sapphire Heaven
Beyond a mortal man impassioned far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star Seen 'mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odor with the violet-- Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet Against the windowpanes; St. Agnes' moon hath set. -John Keats (1795-1821), The Eve of St. Agnes |
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Phantom Ship
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon like a prison bar, And a huge black hulk, that was magnified By its own reflection in the tide. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), Paul Revere's Ride |
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Last Lights
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-- -Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), God's Grandeur |
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Empty Nest
Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale, Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain; Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain, Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Lost Echo
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, And feeds her grief with his rememberd lay; -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
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Nocturnal Secret
Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then, As night is withdrawn From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May, Dream, while the innumerable choir of day Welcome the dawn. -Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Nightingales |
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Tempestuous Day
from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), England in 1819 |
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Eternity
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Brahma |
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Desolate Passion
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. -Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae |