As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

As I one ev'ning sat before my cell,
Me thoughts a star did shoot into my lap.
I rose, and shook my clothes, as knowing well,
That from small fires comes oft no small mishap.
When suddenly I heard one say,
-Do as thou usest, disobey,
Expell good motions from thy breast,
Which have the face of fire, but end in rest-.

I, who had heard of music in the spheres,
But not of speech in stars, began to muse:
But turning to my God, whose ministers
The stars and all things are; if I refuse,
Dread Lord, said I , so oft my good;

In the feathergrass steppe
Sources lie buried,
The thirsty sun knows
Life isn't raspberries.

In barren haymeadows
A child tarries,
Walnut crosier
Outstretched, gold-eyed,
The bracing treasure,
Slender, streams.

They bubble deep,
Both song and splashes, -
In the live coppice
An April peal.

More wondrous than God's lightning bolts,
The artesian well fills
The sham spays' dry dugs
With love's hypogean milk.

Old Archibald, in his eternal chair,
Where trespassers, whatever their degree,
Were soon frowned out again, was looking off
Across the clover when he said to me:

“My green hill yonder, where the sun goes down
Without a scratch, was once inhabited
By trees that injured him—an evil trash
That made a cage, and held him while he bled.

“Gone fifty years, I see them as they were
Before they fell. They were a crooked lot
To spoil my sunset, and I saw no time
In fifty years for crooked things to rot.

Apparently with no surprise,
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play,
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on.
The sun proceeds unmoved,
To measure off another day,
For an approving God.

Eyes the color of winter water,
eyes the winter of water where I

Quoits in the Spartan month
Hyacinthius, the game
joins us, pronounces

us god and boy: I toss him
the discus thinking This is mine
and the wind says Not yet

Memory with small hairs
pasted to pale wet skin
(the flower hyacinthos,
perhaps a fritillaria, not
the modern Hyacinthus orientalis)

After he smells of orange groves,
spreads white ass meat for me
him with a hole drilled in him I try
to fill: I ease my way into his orchard

Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.
Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.
I have closed my arms again. They must do without.
To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb.
                Do not write!

Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may.
Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know?
To hear that you love me, when you are far away,
Is like hearing from heaven and never to go.

Chorus: Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing
'My God and King.'

Verse: The heav'ns are not too high,
His praise may thither fly:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.

Chorus: Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing,
'My God and King.'

Verse: The church with psalms must shout
No door can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.

Chorus: Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing,
'My God and King.'

"A Bill which has shocked the conscience of every Christian community
in Europe." -- Mr. F. E. Smith, on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill.

Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?

Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?

Russian peasants round their pope
Huddled, Smith,
Hear about it all, I hope,