The woman in the pointed hood
And cloak blue-gray like a pigeon's wing,
Whose orchard climbs to the balsam-wood,
Has done a cruel thing.
To her back door-step came a ghost,
A girl who had been ten years dead,
She stood by the granite hitching-post
And begged for a piece of bread.
Now why should I, who walk alone,
Who am ironical and proud,
Turn, when a woman casts a stone
At a beggar in a shroud?
I saw the dead girl cringe and whine,
And cower in the weeping air--
But, oh, she was no kin of mine,
And so I did not care!
Please yourself how you have it.
Take my words, and fling
Them down on the counter roundly;
See if they ring.
Sift my looks and expressions,
And see what proportion there is
Of sand in my doubtful sugar
Of verities.
Have a real stock-taking
Of my manly breast;
Find out if I'm sound or bankrupt,
Or a poor thing at best.
For I am quite indifferent
To your dubious state,
As to whether you've found a fortune
In me, or a flea-bitten fate.
Your love and pity doth the impression fill,
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all-the-world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others' voices, that my adder's sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred,
That all the world besides methinks are dead.
Alas, good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate where all the rage
Is on one side: in vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks to beguile
Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh, conquer what you cannot satiate!
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy
In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.
Wanton wenches do not bring
For my hairs black colouring :
For my locks, girls, let 'em be
Grey or white, all's one to me.
In former times such as had store of coin,
In wars at home, or when for conquests bound,
For fear that some their treasure should purloin,
Gave it to keep to spirits within the ground,
And to attend it them as strongly tied
Till they return'd; home when they never came,
Such as by art to get the same have tried
From the strong Spirit by no means force the same;
Nearer men come, that further flies away,
Striving to hold it strongly in the deep.
E'en as this Spirit, so you alone do play
With those rich beauties Heav'n gives you to keep;
Pity, so left to the coldness of your blood,
Not to avail you, nor do the others good.
Some men there be which like my method well
And much commend the strangeness of my vein;
Some say I have a passing pleasing strain;
Some say that im my humor I excel;
Some, who not kindly relish my conceit,
They say, as poets do, I use to feign,
And in bare words paint out my passion's pain.
Thus sundry men their sundry words repeat;
I pass not, I, how men affected be,
Nor who commends or discommends my verse;
It pleaseth me, if I my woes rehearse,
And in my lines if she my love may see.
Only my comfort still consists in this,
Writing her praise I cannot write amiss.
The world is taking little heed
And plods from day to day:
The vulgar flourish like a weed,
The learned pass away.
We miss him on the summer path
The lonely summer day,
Where mowers cut the pleasant swath
And maidens make the hay.
The vulgar take but little heed;
The garden wants his care;
There lies the book he used to read,
There stands the empty chair.
The boat laid up, the voyage oer,
And passed the stormy wave,
The world is going as before,
The poet in his grave.
Summer -- we all have seen --
A few of us -- believed --
A few -- the more aspiring
Unquestionably loved --
But Summer does not care --
She goes her spacious way
As eligible as the moon
To our Temerity --
The Doom to be adored --
The Affluence conferred --
Unknown as to an Ecstasy
The Embryo endowed --
GONE the wild day:
A wilder night
Coming makes way
For brief twilight.
Where the firm soaked road
Mounts and is lost
In the high beech-wood
It shines almost.
The beeches keep
A stormy rest,
Breathing deep
Of wind from the west.
The wood is black,
With a misty steam.
Above, the cloud pack
Breaks for one gleam.
She had a name among the children;
But no one loved though someone owned
Her, locked her out of doors at bedtime
And had her kittens duly drowned.
In Spring, nevertheless, this cat
Ate blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales,
And birds of bright voice and plume and flight,
As well as scraps from neighbours' pails.
I loathed and hated her for this;
One speckle on a thrush's breast
Was worth a million such; and yet
She lived long, till God gave her rest.
THERE was a weasel lived in the sun
With all his family,
Till a keeper shot him with his gun
And hung him up on a tree,
Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.
There was a crow who was no sleeper,
But a thief and a murderer
Till a very late hour; and this keeper
Made him one of the things that were,
To hang and flap in rain and wind,
In the sun and in the snow.
There are no more sins to be sinned
On the dead oak tree bough.