Rain, rain, and sun! A rainbow in the sky!
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange.
How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise.
And out of darkness came the hands that reach through nature, moulding men.
Tis not your work, but Love’s. Love, unperceived, A more ideal Artist he than all, Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes Darker than the darkest pansies, and that hair More black than ashbuds in the front of March.
The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.
I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods.
The woman is so hard Upon the woman.
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to towered Camelot.
Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.
Attain the unattainable.
Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills. Like footsteps upon wool.
Nothing in Nature is unbeautiful.
Name and fame! to fly sublime Through the courts, the camps, the schools Is to be the ball of Time, Bandied in the hands of fools.
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
A pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.
I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.
I thought I could not breathe in that fine air That pure severity of perfect light I yearned for warmth and colour which I found In Lancelot.
Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead.