Amid my Bale I bath in blisse,
I swim in heaven, I sinke in hell:
I find amends for every misse,
And yet my moane no tongue can tell.
I live and love, what wold you more:
As never lover liv'd before.

I laugh sometimes with little lust,
So jest I oft and feele no joye:
Myne ease is builded all on trust:
And yit mistrust breedes myne anoye.
I live and lacke, I lacke and have:
I have and misse the thing I crave.

These things seeme strange, yet are they trew,
Beleeve me sweete my state is such,
One pleasure which I wold eschew,

American jump, American jump,
One--two--three.
Under the water, under the sea,
Catching fishes for my tea,
--Dead,
Or, Alive,
Or, Round the world?

An American frigate from Baltimore came,
Her guns mounted forty, the Richard by name;
Went to cruise in the channel of old England,
With a noble commander, Paul Jones was the man.

We had not sail'd long before we did espy
A large forty-four, and a twenty close by:
These two warlike ships, full laden with store,
Our captain pursued to the bold Yorkshire shore.

At the hour of twelve, Pierce came alongside.
With a loud speaking-trumpet, “Whence came you?” he cried;
“Quick give me an answer, I hail'd you before,

A MERICA , O Power benign, great hearts revere your name,
You stretch your hand to every land, to weak and strong the same;
You claim no conquest of the sea, nor conquest of the field,
But conquest for the rights of man, that despots all shall yield.

Chorus:

America, fair land of mine, home of the just and true,
All hail to thee, land of the free, and the Red-White-and-Blue.

America, staunch, undismayed, your spirit is our might:
No splendor falls on feudal walls upon your mountain's height,

America! dear brother land!
While yet the shotted guns are mute,
Accept a brotherly salute,
A hearty grip of England's hand.

To-morrow, when the sulphurous glow
Of war shall dim the stars above,
Be sure the star of England's love
Is over you, come weal or woe.

Go forth in hope! Go forth in might!
To all your nobler self be true,
That coming times may see in you
The vanguard of the hosts of light.

Though wrathful justice load and train
Your guns, be every breach they make
A gateway pierced for mercy's sake

Not long ago, I studied medicine.
It was terrible, what the body told.
I'd look inside another person's mouth
And see the desolation of the world.
I'd see his genitals and think of sin.

Because my body speaks the stranger's language,
I've never understood those nods and stares.
My parents held me in their arms, and still
I think I've disappointed them; they care
And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage

To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry.
I look inside their other-person's mouths
And see the sleek interior of souls.

( NEW STYLE )

A M I sincere? I say I dote
On everything that Browning wrote;
I know some bits by heart to quote
— — But then She reads him.
I say — and is it strictly true? —
How I admire her cockatoo;
Well! in a way of course I do:
— — But then She feeds him.

And I become, at her command,
The sternest Tory in the land;
The Grand Old Man is far from grand;
— — But then She states it.
Nay! worse than that, I am so tame,
I once admitted — to my shame —
That football was a brutal game:

Am I despised because you say,
And I dare swear, that I am grey?
Know, lady, you have but your day,
And time will come when you shall wear
Such frost and snow upon your hair.
And when (though long) it comes to pass
You question with your looking-glass,
And in that sincere crystal seek
But find no rosebud in your cheek,
Nor any bed to give the show
Where such a rare Carnation grew,
Ah! then too late, close in your chamber keeping,
It will be told
That you are old,
By those true tears y'are weeping.

Always these gallows,
this crowd, the eyes
that meet and turn away,
these daggers of defeat
that hide in the bricks of this house,
in seasons to come,
in the very seeds of fruit.

Always these cafes,
these wounding tongues
that articulate through smoke
like eyes that search and search.

In eyes, in shivering hands,
in laurel, in mirrors —
always the face of death
masked like a prince of the heart,
a knight who comes
to awaken your feast.

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried