Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,Our gloom - pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the ‘Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes, - Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my Soul.
Sonnet Written in Answer to a Sonnet Ending thus:
Dark eyes are dearer far
Than those that mock the hyacinthine bell!
J. H. Reynolds
Blue! ’Tis the life of heaven, - the domain
Of Cynthia, - the wide palace of the sun, -
The tent of Hesperus, and all his train, -
The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun.
Blue! Tis the life of waters: - Ocean
And all its vassal streams, pools numberless,
May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can
Subside, if not to dark blue nativeness.
Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers, - Forget-me-not, - the bluebell, - and, that queen
Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers
Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,
When in an Eye thou art, alive with fate!
Sonnet: After dark vapours have oppress’d our plains
After dark vapours have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding - fruit ripening in stillness - autumn suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves -
Sweet Sappho’s cheek - a smiling infant’s breath -
The gradual sand that through an hourglass runs -
A woodland rivulet - a Poet’s death.
Sonnet to John Hamilton Reynolds
O that a week could be an age, and we
Felt parting and warm meeting every week,
Then one poor year a thousand years would be,
The flush of welcome ever on the cheek:
So could we live long life in little space,
So time itself would be annihilate,
So a day’s journey in oblivious haze
To serve our joys would lengthen and dilate.
O to arrive each Monday morn from Ind!
To land each Tuesday from the rich Levant! In little time a host of joys to bind,
And keep our souls in one eternal pant!
This morn, my friend, and yester-evening taught
Me how to harbour such a happy thought.
Sonnet on Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
O golden tongued Romance, with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren, Queen of far-away!
Leave melodising on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit:
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme! When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But, when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings’ to fly at my desire.
Sonnet: Before he went to feed with owls and bats
Before he went to feed with owls and bats
Nebuchadnezzar had an ugly dream,
Worse than an hus’if s when she thinks her cream
Made a naumachia for mice and rats.
