Life poems
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The State Of Age
© George Meredith
Rub thou thy battered lamp: nor claim nor beg
Honours from aught about thee. Light the young.
Translated from Geibel
© Amy Levy
O say, thou wild, thou oft deceived heart,
What mean these noisy throbbings in my breast?
After thy long, unutterable woe
Wouldst thou not rest?
To Vernon Lee
© Amy Levy
On Bellosguardo, when the year was young,
We wandered, seeking for the daffodil
And dark anemone, whose purples fill
The peasant's plot, between the corn-shoots sprung.
White Hairs
© Wang Wei
Once a tiny child now an old man.
White hairs to match the soft down.
How the heart gets hurt by life.
Beyond the Gateless Gates
Where craving ends.
The Village Garden
© Amy Levy
Here, where your garden fenced about and still is,
Here, where the unmoved summer air is sweet
With mixed delight of lavender and lilies,
Dreaming I linger in the noontide heat.
The Two Terrors
© Amy Levy
Which way she turn, my soul finds no relief,
My smitten soul may not be comforted;
Alternately she swings from grief to grief,
And, poised between them, sways from dread to dread.
For there she dreads because she knows; and here,
Because she knows not, only faints with fear.
Parting And Meeting
© Robert Laurence Binyon
But when from far in the thronged street
Our eyes each other leap to find,
O when at last our arms enwind,
And on our lips our longings meet,
The world glows new with each heart--beat,
Love is come home, Life is enshrined.
The Old Poet
© Amy Levy
I will be glad because it is the Spring;
I will forget the winter in my heart--
Dead hopes and withered promise; and will wring
A little joy from life ere life depart.
The End of the Day
© Amy Levy
To B. T.
Dead-tired, dog-tired, as the vivid day
Fails and slackens and fades away.--
The sky that was so blue before
Straw in the Street
© Amy Levy
Straw in the street where I pass to-day
Dulls the sound of the wheels and feet.
'Tis for a failing life they lay
Straw in the street.
Sinfonia Eroica
© Amy Levy
(To Sylvia.)
My Love, my Love, it was a day in June,
A mellow, drowsy, golden afternoon;
And all the eager people thronging came
Philosophy
© Amy Levy
Ere all the world had grown so drear,
When I was young and you were here,
'Mid summer roses in summer weather,
What pleasant times we've had together!
The Borough. Letter XXIII: Prisons
© George Crabbe
'TIS well--that Man to all the varying states
Of good and ill his mind accommodates;
New Love, New Life
© Amy Levy
She, who so long has lain
Stone-stiff with folded wings,
Within my heart again
The brown bird wakes and sings.
The Dead To Clemenceau:
© Robinson Jeffers
NOVEMBER, 1929
Come (we say) Clemenceau.
Why should you live longer than others? The vacuum that sucked
Us down, and the former stars, draws at you also.
