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Percy Bysshe Shelley
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;
We talked as Girls do --
Fond, and late --
We speculated fair, on every subject, but the Grave --
Of ours, none affair --
We handled Destinies, as cool --
As we -- Disposers -- be --
And God, a Quiet Party
To our Authority --
But fondest, dwelt upon Ourself
As we eventual -- be --
When Girls to Women, softly raised
We -- occupy -- Degree --
We parted with a contract
To cherish, and to write
But Heaven made both, impossible
Before another night.
I am not the black cat.
There were four of us;
my grandmother,
a black cat,
a myth,
and I.
My grandmother often
told us a myth.
When you are ill, she said,
if a black cat
comes and sits on your bed
it means that you
will die soon.
I was only six,
seriously ill.
Our black cat
SINCE thou hast given me this good hope, O God,
That while my footsteps tread the flowery sod
And the great woods embower me, and white dawn
And purple even sweetly lead me on
From day to day, and night to night, O God,
My life shall no wise miss the light of love;
But ever climbing, climb above
Man's one poor star, man's supine lands,
Into the azure steadfastness of death,
My life shall no wise lack the light of love,
My hands not lack the loving touch of hands;
But day by day, while yet I draw my breath,
And day by day, unto my last of years,
I shall be one that has a perfect friend.
Her heart shall taste my laughter and my tears,
And her kind eyes shall lead me to the end.
Long vast shapes... cooled and flushed through with darkness....
Lidless windows
Glazed with a flashy luster
From some little pert cafe chirping up like a sparrow.
And down among iron guts
Piled silver
Throwing gray spatter of light... pale without heat...
Like the pallor of dead bodies.
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,--but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?
Take a hold now
On the silver handles here,
Six silver handles,
One for each of his old pals.
Take hold
And lift him down the stairs.
Put him on the rollers
Over the floor of the hearse.
Take him on the last haul,
To the cold straight house.
The level even house,
To the last house of all.
The dead say nothing
And the dead know much
And the dead hold under their tongues
A locked-up story.
He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.
I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.
Behold, as goblins dark of mien
And portly tyrants dyed with crime
Change, in the transformation scene,
At Christmas, in the pantomime,
Instanter, at the prompter's cough,
The fairy bonnets them, and they
Throw their abhorred carbuncles off
And blossom like the flowers in May.
— So mankind, to angelic eyes,
So, through the scenes of life below,
In life's ironical disguise,
A travesty of man, ye go:
But fear not: ere the curtain fall,
Death in the transformation scene
Steps forward from her pedestal,
Apparent, as the fairy Queen;
Here she lies, a pretty bud,
Lately made of flesh and blood;
Who as soon fell fast asleep,
As her little eyes did peep.
--Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth, that lightly covers her.
Oh Sumptuous moment
Slower go
That I may gloat on thee --
'Twill never be the same to starve
Now I abundance see --
Which was to famish, then or now --
The difference of Day
Ask him unto the Gallows led --
With morning in the sky --
A Pit -- but Heaven over it --
And Heaven beside, and Heaven abroad,
And yet a Pit --
With Heaven over it.
To stir would be to slip --
To look would be to drop --
To dream -- to sap the Prop
That holds my chances up.
Ah! Pit! With Heaven over it!
The depth is all my thought --
I dare not ask my feet --
'Twould start us where we sit
So straight you'd scarce suspect
It was a Pit -- with fathoms under it --
Its Circuit just the same.
Seed -- summer -- tomb --