Skip to main content

Gethsemane

A SUFFERING soul in sorrow's vale
Now pleads for sympathy:
“‘Could ye not watch with me one hour’
In my Gethsemane?

My neighbor of the Happy Heights,
Could you not, lovingly,
Divide your happiness with me,
In my Gethsemane?

To every soul must come, some day,
Its meed of agony;
But blest will be the bountiful
In their Gethsemane.”

Yuan Zhen to Bo Juyi

Other people too have friends that they love;
But ours was a love such as few friends have known
You were all my sustenance; it mattered more
To see you daily than to get my morning food
And if there was a single day when we did not meet
I would sit listless, my mind in a tangle of gloom
To think we are now thousands of miles apart,
Lost like clouds, each drifting on his far way!
Those clouds on high, where many winds blow,
What is their chance of ever meeting again?
And if in open heaven the beings of the air
Are driven and thwarted, what of Man below?

Ode 32: On the Number of His Amours

If you can count the leaves of the trees,
Or the foaming waves of the untamed seas,
Then will I entrust to you alone
To reckon the amours I have known.
Take at Athens twenty mistresses,
And then you may add fifteen to these.
Put me a countless number down
At Corinth, that famed Achæan town,
Where the women are so dangerously fair
From falling in love one can't escape there.
My Lesbian I will now indite,
Next Ionian and Carian; and you may write
Many at Rhodes, all my heart's delight.
The sum when computed carefully

Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest

Wilt thou love God, as he thee! then digest,
My Soule, this wholsome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.
The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne'er begonne)
Hath deign'd to chuse thee by adoption,
Coheire to'his glory,'and Sabbaths endlesse rest.
And as a robb'd man, which by search doth finde
His stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy'it againe:
The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,
Us whom he'had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.

Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt

Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt
To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,
And her soul early into heaven ravished,
Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set.
Here the admiring her my mind did whet
To seek thee God; so streams do show their head;
But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.
But why should I beg more love, when as thou
Dost woo my soul for hers; offering all thine:
And dost not only fear lest I allow
My love to saints and angels, things divine,

The Flower of Banchory

Young Spring, with opening flowers,
Was bright'ning vale and lea;
While Love, 'mid budding bowers,
Woke sweet melody:
When by Dee's noble river
I strayed in happy glee,
And left my heart for ever
In fair Banchory.
O Banchory! fair Banchory!
How dear that happy day to me,
I wandered by the banks o' Dee,
And won the flower o' Banchory

How was't that I, a rover,
So reckless and so free,
Became a constant lover
By flowing Dee?
Because, like Spring, my charmer,
When fondly, kindly press'd,
Became like Summer, warmer,