Mad for Poetry

The night was wide, and furnished scant    With but a single star,    That often as a cloud it met    Blew out itself for fear.     The wind pursued the…

 At half-past three a single bird    Unto a silent sky    Propounded but a single term    Of cautious melody.     At half-past four, experiment    Had subjugated test,    And lo! her silver principle    Supplanted…

Departed to the judgment,    A mighty afternoon;    Great clouds like ushers leaning,    Creation looking on.     The flesh surrendered, cancelled,    The bodiless begun;    Two worlds, like audiences, disperse    And leave the soul…

  We never know how high we are    Till we are called to rise;    And then, if we are true to plan,    Our statures touch the skies.     The heroism…

As far from pity as complaint,    As cool to speech as stone,    As numb to revelation    As if my trade were bone.     As far from time as history,    As…

   As imperceptibly as grief    The summer lapsed away, —    Too imperceptible, at last,    To seem like perfidy.     A quietness distilled,    As twilight long begun,    Or Nature, spending with herself    Sequestered afternoon….

  As by the dead we love to sit,    Become so wondrous dear,    As for the lost we grapple,    Though all the rest are here, —     In broken mathematics    We…

 An altered look about the hills;    A Tyrian light the village fills;    A wider sunrise in the dawn;    A deeper twilight on the lawn;    A print of a vermilion…

Come slowly, Eden!    Lips unused to thee,    Bashful, sip thy jasmines,    As the fainting bee,     Reaching late his flower,    Round her chamber hums,    Counts his nectars — enters,    And is lost…