I heard no longer The snowy-banded, dilettante, Delicate-handed priest intone.
Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.
That man’s the best cosmopolite Who loves his native country best.
Those who depend on the merits of their ancestors may be said to search in the roots of the tree for those fruits which the branches ought to produce.
Either sex alone is half itself.
In the long years liker they must grow; The man be more of woman, she of man.
I waited for the train at Coventry; I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge, To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped The city’s ancient legend into this.
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers.
O Blackbird! sing me something well: While all the neighbors shoot thee round, I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground, Where thou may’st warble, eat and dwell.
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land; Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand the downward slope to death.
Read my little fable: He that runs may read. Most can raise the flowers now, For all have got the seed.
We are ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times.
I follow up the quest despite day and night and death and hell.
Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.
Few from too near inspection fail to lose, Distance on all a mellowing haze bestows; And who is not indebted to that aid Which throws his failures into welcome shade?
Yet all experience is an arc, where through gleams the untraveled world, whose margin fades forever, and forever as I move...
No diamonds! for God’s love, a little air!
In that still place she, hoarded in herself, Grew, seldom seen: not less among us lived Her fame from lip to lip. Who had not heard Of Rose, the Gardener’s daughter? Where was he, So blunt in memory, so old at heart, At such a distance from his youth in grief, That, having seen, forgot? The common mouth, So gross to express delight, in praise of her Grew oratory. Such a lord is Love, And Beauty such a mistress of the world.