Delphi Poetry Anthology: The World's Greatest Poems (Delphi Poets Series Book 50)

by Homer

Plucked in the garden, all the summer through

  And winter, and it seemed as if they grew

  In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.

  So, in the like name of that love of ours, 5

  Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,

  And which on warm and cold days I withdrew

  From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers

  Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,

  And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine, 10

  Here’s ivy! — take them, as I used to do

  Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine

  Instruct thine eyes to keep their colors true,

  And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.

  List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

  List of Poets in Alphabetical Order

  The Sleep

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

  He giveth his beloved sleep — Ps. cxxvii. 2.

  OF all the thoughts of God that are

  Borne inward unto souls afar,

  Along the Psalmist’s music deep,

  Now tell me if that any is,

  For gift or grace, surpassing this — 5

  ‘He giveth His belovèd sleep’?

  What would we give to our beloved?

  The hero’s heart to be unmoved,

  The poet’s star-tuned harp, to sweep,

  The patriot’s voice, to teach and rouse, 10

  The monarch’s crown, to light the brows?

  He giveth His belovèd, sleep.

  What do we give to our beloved?

  A little faith all undisproved,

  A little dust to overweep, 15

  And bitter memories to make

  The whole earth blasted for our sake.

  He giveth His belovèd, sleep.

  ‘Sleep soft, beloved!’ we sometimes say,

  But have no tune to charm away 20

  Sad dreams that through the eye-lids creep.

  But never doleful dream again

  Shall break the happy slumber when

  He giveth His belovèd, sleep.

  O earth, so full of dreary noises! 25

  O men, with wailing in your voices!

  O delvèd gold, the wailers heap!

  O strife, O curse, that o’er it fall!

  God strikes a silence through you all,

  He giveth His belovèd, sleep. 30

  His dews drop mutely on the hill;

  His cloud above it saileth still,

  Though on its slope men sow and reap.

  More softly than the dew is shed,

  Or cloud is floated overhead, 35

  He giveth His belovèd, sleep.

  Aye, men may wonder while they scan

  A living, thinking, feeling man

  Confirmed in such a rest to keep;

  But angels say, and through the word 40

  I think their happy smile is heard —

  ‘He giveth His belovèd, sleep.’

  For me, my heart that erst did go

  Most like a tired child at a show,

  That sees through tears the mummers leap, 45

  Would now its wearied vision close,

  Would child-like on His love repose,

  Who giveth His belovèd, sleep.

  And, friends, dear friends, — when it shall be

  That this low breath is gone from me, 50

  And round my bier ye come to weep,

  Let One, most loving of you all,

  Say, ‘Not a tear must o’er her fall;

  He giveth His belovèd, sleep.’

  List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

  List of Poets in Alphabetical Order

  Aurora Leigh. First Book.

  OF writing many books there is no end;

  And I who have written much in prose and verse

  For others’ uses, will write now for mine,–

  Will write my story for my better self,

  As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

  Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it

  Long after he has ceased to love you, just

  To hold together what he was and is.

  I, writing thus, am still what men call young;

  I have not so far left the coasts of life

  To travel inland, that I cannot hear

  That murmur of the outer Infinite

  Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep

  When wondered at for smiling; not so far,

  But still I catch my mother at her post

  Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,

  ‘Hush, hush–here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet eyes

  Leap forward, taking part against her word

  In the child’s riot. Still I sit and feel

  My father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,

  Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;

  And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knew

  He liked it better than a better jest)

  Inquire how many golden scudi went

  To make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,

  Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,–

  Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!

  I’m still too young, too young to sit alone.

  I write. My mother was a Florentine,

  Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me

  When scarcely I was four years old; my life,

  A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp

  Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;

  She could not bear the joy of giving life–

  The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss

  Had left a longer weight upon my lips,

  It might have steadied the uneasy breath,

  And reconciled and fraternised my soul

  With the new order. As it was, indeed,

  I felt a mother-want about the world,

  And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb

  Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,–

  As restless as a nest-deserted bird

  Grown chill through something being away, though what

  It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born

  To make my father sadder, and myself

  Not overjoyous, truly. Women know

  The way to rear up children, (to be just,)

  They know a simple, merry, tender knack

  Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,

  And stringing pretty words that make no sense,

  And kissing full sense into empty words;

  Which things are corals to cut life upon,

  Although such trifles: children learn by such,

  Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,

  And get not over-early solemnised,–

  But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,

  Which burns and hurts not,–not a single bloom,–

  Become aware and unafraid of Love.

  Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well

  –Mine did, I know,–but still with heavier brains,

  And wills more consciously responsible,

  And not as wisely, since less foolishly;

  So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.

  My father was an austere Englishman,

  Who, after a dry life-time spent at home

  In college-learning, law, and parish talk,

  Was flooded with a passion unaware,

  His whole provisioned and complacent past

  Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood

  In Florence, where he had come to spend a month

  And note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains,

  He musing somewhat absently perhaps

  Some English question . . whether men should pay

  The unpopular but necessary tax

  With left or right hand–in the alien sun

  In that great square of the Santissima,


  There drifted past him (scarcely marked enough

  To move his comfortable island-scorn,)

  A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,–

  The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding up

  Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant

  To the blue luminous tremor of the air,

  And letting drop the white wax as they went

  To eat the bishop’s wafer at the church;

  From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,

  A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,

  And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,

  Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,

  He too received his sacramental gift

  With eucharistic meanings; for he loved.

  And thus beloved, she died. I’ve heard it said

  That but to see him in the first surprise

  Of widower and father, nursing me,

  Unmothered little child of four years old,

  His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,

  As if the gold would tarnish,–his grave lips

  Contriving such a miserable smile,

  As if he knew needs must, or I should die,

  And yet ’twas hard,–would almost make the stones

  Cry out for pity. There’s a verse he set

  In Santa Croce to her memory,

  ‘Weep for an infant too young to weep much

  When death removed this mother’–stops the mirth

  To-day, on women’s faces when they walk

  With rosy children hanging on their gowns,

  Under the cloister, to escape the sun

  That scorches in the piazza. After which,

  He left our Florence, and made haste to hide

  Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,

  Among the mountains above Pelago;

  Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need

  Of mother nature more than others use,

  And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and full

  Of mystic contemplations, come to feed

  Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own–

  Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,

  For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,

  Will get to wear it as a hat aside

  With a flower stuck in’t. Father, then, and child,

  We lived among the mountains many years,

  God’s silence on the outside of the house,

  And we, who did not speak too loud, within;

  And old Assunta to make up the fire,

  Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flame

  Which lightened from the firewood, made alive

  That picture of my mother on the wall.

  The painter drew it after she was dead;

  And when the face was finished, throat and hands,

  Her cameriera carried him, in hate

  Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade

  She dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paint

  No sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrong

  Her poor signora.’ Therefore, very strange

  The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch

  For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up

  And gaze across them, half in terror, half

  In adoration, at the picture there,–

  That swan-like supernatural white life,

  Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk

  Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power

  To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:

  For hours I sate and stared. Asssunta’s awe

  And my poor father’s melancholy eyes

  Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts

  When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew

  In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,

  Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,

  Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,

  Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,

  With still that face . . . which did not therefore change,

  But kept the mystic level of all forms

  And fears and admirations; was by turn

  Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,–

  A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,

  A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,

  A still Medusa, with mild milky brows

  All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes

  Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,

  Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords

  Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first

  Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,

  And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;

  Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile

  In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth

  My father pushed down on the bed for that,–

  Or, my dead mother, without smile or kiss,

  Buried at Florence. All which images,

  Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves

  Before my meditative childhood, . . as

  The incoherencies of change and death

  Are represented fully, mixed and merged,

  In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.

  And while I stared away my childish wits

  Upon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)

  My father, who through love had suddenly

  Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose

  From chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,

  Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk

  Or grow anew familiar with the sun,–

  Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,

  But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,–

  Whom love had unmade from a common man

  But not completed to an uncommon man,–

  My father taught me what he had learnt the best

  Before he died and left me,–grief and love.

  And, seeing we had books among the hills,

  Strong words of counselling souls, confederate

  With vocal pines and waters,–out of books

  He taught me all the ignorance of men,

  And how God laughs in heaven when any man

  Says, ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;

  In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.’

  He sent the schools to school, demonstrating

  A fool will pass for such through one mistake,

  While a philosopher will pass for such,

  Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross

  And heaped up to a system.

  I am like,

  They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows

  Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth

  Of delicate features,–paler, near as grave;

  But then my mother’s smile breaks up the whole,

  And makes it better sometimes than itself.

  So, nine full years, our days were hid with God

  Among his mountains. I was just thirteen,

  Still growing like the plants from unseen roots

  In tongue-tied Springs,–and suddenly awoke

  To full life and its needs and agonies,

  With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside

  A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,

  Makes awful lightning. His last word was, ‘Love–’

  ‘Love, my child, love, love!’–(then he had done with grief)

  ‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone,

  And none was left to love in all the world.

  There, ended childhood: what succeeded next

  I recollect as, after fevers, men

  Thread back the passage of delirium,

  Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;

  Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives
;

  A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flank

  With flame, that it should eat and end itself

  Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,

  I do remember clearly, how there came

  A stranger with authority, not right,

  (I thought not) who commanded, caught me up

  From old Assunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,

  She let me go,–while I, with ears too full

  Of my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,

  In all a child’s astonishment at grief

  Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,

  My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!

  The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,

  Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,

  Like one in anger drawing back her skirts

  Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea

  Inexorably pushed between us both,

  And sweeping up the ship with my despair

  Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.

  Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;

  Ten nights and days, without the common face

  Of any day or night; the moon and sun

  Cut off from the green reconciling earth,

  To starve into a blind ferocity

  And glare unnatural; the very sky

  (Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea

  As if no human heart should ‘scape alive,)

  Bedraggled with the desolating salt,

  Until it seemed no more than holy heaven

  To which my father went. All new, and strange–

  The universe turned stranger, for a child.

  Then, land!–then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs

  Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home

  Among those mean red houses through the fog?

  And when I heard my father’s language first

  From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,

  I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,–

  And some one near me said the child was mad

  Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.

  Was this my father’s England? the great isle?

  The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship

  Or verdure, field from field, as man from man;

  The skies themselves looked low and positive,

  As almost you could touch them with a hand,

  And dared to do it, they were so far off

  From God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurred