Idylls of the King and a New Selection of Poems

by Alfred Tennyson

  The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds

  To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

  The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

  So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

  Dear as remember’d kisses after death,

  And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d

  On lips that are for others; deep as love,

  Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

  O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

  [publ. 1847]

  ASK ME NO MORE

  ASK me no more: the moon may draw the sea;

  The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the

  shape,

  With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;

  But O too fond, when have I answer’d thee?

  Ask me no more.

  Ask me no more: what answer should I give?

  I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:

  Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!

  Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;

  Ask me no more.

  Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal’d;

  I strove against the stream and all in vain:

  Let the great river take me to the main:

  No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;

  Ask me no more.

  [publ. 1850]

  NOW SLEEPS THE CRIMSON PETAL

  NOW sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

  Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

  Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:

  The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

  Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,

  And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

  Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

  And all thy heart lies open unto me.

  Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

  A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

  Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

  And slips into the bosom of the lake:

  So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

  Into my bosom and be lost in me.

  [publ. 1847]

  THE EAGLE (FRAGMENT)

  HE CLASPS the crag with crooked hands;

  Close to the sun in lonely lands,

  Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

  He watches from his mountain walls,

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.

  [1846-51?; publ. 1851]

  From IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.

  OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII

  STRONG Son of God, immortal Love,

  Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

  By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

  Believing where we cannot prove;

  Thine are these orbs of light and shade;

  Thou madest Life in man and brute;

  Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot

  Is on the skull which thou hast made.

  Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

  Thou madest man, he knows not why;

  He thinks he was not made to die;

  And thou has made him: thou art just.

  Thou seemest human and divine,

  The highest, holiest manhood, thou:

  Our wills are ours, we know not how;

  Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

  Our little systems have their day;

  They have their day and cease to be;

  They are but broken lights of thee,

  And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

  We have but faith: we cannot know;

  For knowledge is of things we see;

  And yet we trust it comes from thee,

  A beam in darkness: let it grow.

  Let knowledge grow from more to more,

  But more of reverence in us dwell;

  That mind and soul, according well,

  May make one music as before,

  But vaster. We are fools and slight;

  We mock thee when we do not fear:

  But help thy foolish ones to bear;

  Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

  Forgive what seem’d my sin in me,

  What seem’d my worth since I began;

  For merit lives from man to man,

  And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

  Forgive my grief for one removed,

  Thy creature, whom I found so fair.

  I trust he lives in thee, and there

  I find him worthier to be loved.

  Forgive these wild and wandering cries,

  Confusions of a wasted youth;

  Forgive them where they fail in truth,

  And in thy wisdom make me wise.

  1849.

  i

  I held it truth, with him who sings

  To one clear harp in divers tones,

  That men may rise on stepping-stones

  Of their dead selves to higher things.

  But who shall so forecast the years

  And find in loss a gain to match?

  Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch

  The far-off interest of tears?

  Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,

  Let darkness keep her raven gloss:

  Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,

  To dance with Death, to beat the ground,

  Than that the victor Hours should scorn

  The long result of love, and boast,

  “Behold the man that loved and lost,

  But all he was is overworn.”

  vii

  Dark house, by which once more I stand

  Here in the long unlovely street,

  Doors, where my heart was used to beat

  So quickly, waiting for a hand,

  A hand that can be clasp’d no more,

  Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

  And like a guilty thing I creep

  At earliest morning to the door.

  He is not here; but far away

  The noise of life begins again,

  And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

  On the bald street breaks the blank day.

  xiv

  If one should bring me this report,

  That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,

  And I went down unto the quay,

  And found thee lying in the port;

  And standing, muffled round with woe,

  Should see thy passengers in rank

  Come stepping lightly down the plank,

  And beckoning unto those they know;

  And if along with these should come

  The man I held as half-divine,

  Should strike a sudden hand in mine,

  And ask a thousand things of home;

  And I should tell him all my pain,

  And how my life had droop’d of late,

  And he should sorrow o’er my state

  And marvel what possess’d my brain;

  And I perceived no touch of change,

  No hint of death in all his frame,

  But found him all in all the same,

  I should not feel it to be strange.

  xxvii

  I envy not in any moods

  The captive void of noble rage,

  The linnet born within the cage,

  That never knew the summer woods;

  I envy not the beast that takes

  His license in the field of time,

  Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,

  To whom a conscience never wakes;

  Nor, what may count itself as blest,

  The heart that never plighted troth,

  But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;

  Nor any want-begotten rest.

  I hold it true, whate’er befall;

  I feel it, when I sorrow most;

  ’Tis better to have loved and lost

  Than never to have loved at all.

  xliii<
br />
  If Sleep and Death be truly one,

  And every spirit’s folded bloom

  Thro’ all its intervital gloom

  In some long trance should slumber on;

  Unconscious of the sliding hour,

  Bare of the body, might it last,

  And silent traces of the past

  Be all the color of the flower:

  So then were nothing lost to man,

  So that still garden of the souls

  In many a figured leaf enrolls

  The total world since life begun;

  And love will last as pure and whole

  As when he loved me here in Time,

  And at the spiritual prime

  Reawaken with the dawning soul.

  xlv

  The baby new to earth and sky,

  What time his tender palm is prest

  Against the circle of the breast,

  Has never thought that “this is I;”

  But as he grows he gathers much,

  And learns the use of “I,” and “me,”

  And finds “I am not what I see,

  And other than the things I touch.”

  So rounds he to a separate mind

  From whence clear memory may begin,

  As thro’ the frame that binds him in

  His isolation grows defined.

  This use may lie in blood and breath,

  Which else were fruitless of their due,

  Had man to learn himself anew

  Beyond the second birth of Death.

  l

  Be near me when my light is low,

  When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

  And tingle; and the heart is sick,

  And all the wheels of Being slow.

  Be near me when the sensuous frame

  Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;

  And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

  And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

  Be near me when my faith is dry,

  And men the flies of latter spring,

  That lay their eggs, and sting and sing

  And weave their petty cells and die.

  Be near me when I fade away,

  To point the term of human strife,

  And on the low dark verge of life

  The twilight of eternal day.

  liv

  O yet we trust that somehow good

  Will be the final goal of ill,

  To pangs of nature, sins of will,

  Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

  That nothing walks with aimless feet;

  That not one life shall be destroy’d,

  Or cast as rubbish to the void,

  When God hath made the pile complete;

  That not a worm is cloven in vain;

  That not a moth with vain desire

  Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,

  Or but subserves another’s gain.

  Behold, we know not anything;

  I can but trust that good shall fall

  At last—far off—at last, to all,

  And every winter change to spring.

  So runs my dream; but what am I?

  An infant crying in the night;

  An infant crying for the light;

  And with no language but a cry.

  lxvii

  When on my bed the moonlight falls,

  I know that in thy place of rest,

  By that broad water of the west,

  There comes a glory on the walls:

  Thy marble bright in dark appears,

  As slowly steals a silver flame

  Along the letters of thy name,

  And o’er the number of thy years.

  The mystic glory swims away;

  From off my bed the moonlight dies;

  And closing eaves of wearied eyes

  I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:

  And then I know the mist is drawn

  A lucid veil from coast to coast,

  And in the dark church like a ghost

  Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

  lxx

  I cannot see the features right,

  When on the gloom I strive to paint

  The face I know; the hues are faint

  And mix with hollow masks of night;

  Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,

  A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,

  A hand that points, and palled shapes

  In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

  And crowds that stream from yawning doors,

  And shoals of pucker’d faces drive;

  Dark bulks that tumble half alive,

  And lazy lengths on boundless shores;

  Till all at once beyond the will

  I hear a wizard music roll,

  And thro’ a lattice on the soul

  Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

  lxxvii

  What hope is here for modern rhyme

  To him, who turns a musing eye

  On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie

  Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?

  These mortal lullabies of pain

  May bind a book, may line a box,

  May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;

  Or when a thousand moons shall wane

  A man upon a stall may find,

  And, passing, turn the page that tells

  A grief, then changed to something else,

  Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

  But what of that? My darken’d ways

  Shall ring with music all the same;

  To breathe my loss is more than fame,

  To utter love more sweet than praise.

  xciv

  How pure at heart and sound in head,

  With what divine affections bold

  Should be the man whose thought would hold

  An hour’s communion with the dead.

  In vain shalt thou, or any, call

  The spirits from their golden day,

  Except, like them, thou too canst say,

  My spirit is at peace with all.

  They haunt the silence of the breast,

  Imaginations calm and fair,

  The memory like a cloudless air,

  The conscience as a sea at rest;

  But when the heart is full of din,

  And doubt beside the portal waits,

  They can but listen at the gates,

  And hear the household jar within.

  cvi

  Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

  The flying cloud, the frosty light;

  The year is dying in the night;

  Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

  Ring out the old, ring in the new,

  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

  The year is going, let him go;

  Ring out the false, ring in the true.

  Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

  For those that here we see no more;

  Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

  Ring in redress to all mankind.

  Ring out a slowly dying cause,

  And ancient forms of party strife;

  Ring in the nobler modes of life,

  With sweeter manners, purer laws.

  Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

  The faithless coldness of the times;

  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

  But ring the fuller minstrel in.

  Ring out false pride in place and blood,

  The civic slander and the spite;

  Ring in the love of truth and right,

  Ring in the common love of good.

  Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

  Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

  Ring out the thousand wars of old,

  Ring in the thousand years of peace.

  Ring in the valiant man and free,

  The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

  Ring out the darkness of the land,<
br />
  Ring in the Christ that is to be.

  cxxii

  O, wast thou with me, dearest, then,

  While I rose up against my doom,

  And yearn’d to burst the folded gloom,

  To bare the eternal heavens again,

  To feel once more, in placid awe,

  The strong imagination roll

  A sphere of stars about my soul,

  In all her motion one with law.

  If thou wert with me, and the grave

  Divide us not, be with me now,

  And enter in at breast and brow,

  Till all my blood, a fuller wave,

  Be quicken’d with a livelier breath,

  And like an inconsiderate boy,