Skip to main content

My Country

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,

My Beloved May Be With His Friends

My beloved may be with his friends
In shalamar, showering his radiance
On lawns and waterfalls.

I'd pour out my heart but dare not,
For as he ever does, he may twist my words
As subtle hints to prove that I am false.

Superb artist ! I found him resting
At a spring of pearls -
Perhaps he was threading them for belles
As beautiful as pearls !

Love's clear call rings in the woods,
Reverberates in hill and dale;
Perhaps it's the same call that makes
The streams and rivulets roar.

Vernal green fills the world;

My Beloved

My peace, O my brothers and sisters, is my solitude,
And my Beloved is with me always,
For His love I can find no substitute,
And His love is the test for me among mortal beings,
Whenever His Beauty I may contemplate,
He is my "mihrab", towards Him is my "qiblah"
If I die of love, before completing satisfaction,
Alas, for my anxiety in the world, alas for my distress,
O Healer (of souls) the heart feeds upon its desire,
The striving after union with Thee has healed my soul,
O my Joy and my Life abidingly,

Music

I have been urged by earnest violins
And drunk their mellow sorrows to the slake
Of all my sorrows and my thirsting sins.
My heart has beaten for a brave drum's sake.
Huge chords have wrought me mighty: I have hurled
Thuds of gods' thunder. And with old winds pondered
Over the curse of this chaotic world,-
With low lost winds that maundered as they wandered.

I have been gay with trivial fifes that laugh;
And songs more sweet than possible things are sweet;
And gongs, and oboes. Yet I guessed not half

Much and More

When thy heart, love-filled, grows graver,
And eternal bliss looks nearer,
Ask thy heart, nor show it favour,
Is the gift or giver dearer?

Love, love on; love higher, deeper;
Let love's ocean close above her;
Only, love thou more love's keeper,
More, the love-creating lover.

Mrs. Browning

O voice of ecstasy and lyric pain,
Divinely throated and divinely heard
Among old England's songsters! Sprite or bird,
Haunting the woods of song with raptured strain!
In whose wild music Love is born and slain.
And young Desire cries ever a battle word,
And Passion goes, ready with kiss or sword,
To make us captive or set free again.
Above the flowery meads of English song,
Enchantment-sweet, her golden numbers pour,
Commanding and compelling, like Desire!
O nightingale and lark, how o'er the throng

MRS ELIZ WHEELER, UNDER THE NAME OF THELOST SHEPHERDESS

Among the myrtles as I walk'd
Love and my sighs thus intertalk'd:
Tell me, said I, in deep distress,
Where I may find my Shepherdess?
--Thou fool, said Love, know'st thou not this?
In every thing that's sweet she is.
In yond' carnation go and seek,
There thou shalt find her lip and cheek;
In that enamell'd pansy by,
There thou shalt have her curious eye;
In bloom of peach and rose's bud,
There waves the streamer of her blood.
--'Tis true, said I; and thereupon
I went to pluck them one by one,
To make of parts an union;

Mrs Albion You've Got A Lovely Daughter for Allen Ginsberg

Albion's most lovely daughter sat on the banks of the Mersey dangling her landing stage in the water.

The daughters of Albion
Arriving by underground at Central Station
Eating hot ecclescakes at the Pierhead
Writing 'Billy Blake is fab' on a wall in Mathew St
Taking off their navyblue schooldrawers and
Putting on nylon panties ready for the night

The daughters of Albion
See the moonlight beating down on them in Bebington
Throw away their chewinggum ready for the goodnight kiss
Sleep in the dinnertime sunlight with old men