together

A virtuous and beauteous youth
Was pledged to a chaste maiden.
I read that in the great sea
They fell into a vortex together.
When a sailor came to take his hand,
Lest he might die in that condition,
He said in anguish from the waves:
‘Leave me. Take the hand of my love.’
Whilst saying this, he despaired of life.
In his agony he was heard to exclaim:
‘Learn not the tale of love from the wretch
Who forgets his beloved in distress.’
Thus the lives of the lovers terminated.

A parrot, having been imprisoned in a cage with a crow, was vexed by the sight and said: ‘What a loathsome aspect is this! What an odious figure! What cursed object with rude habits! 0 crow of separation, would that the distance of the east from the west were between us.’

Whoever beholds thee when he rises in the morning
The morn of a day of safety becomes evening to him.
An ill-omened one like thyself is fit to keep thee company
But where in the world is one like thee?

Two Khorasani dervishes travelled together. One of them, being weak, broke his fast every second night whilst the other who was strong consumed every day three meals. It happened that they were captured at the gate of a town on suspicion of being spies; whereon each of them was confined in a closet and the aperture of it walled up with mud bricks. After two weeks it became known that they were guiltless. Accordingly the doors were opened and the strong man was found to be dead whilst the weak fellow had remained alive.

A Chinese slave-girl having been brought to a king, he desired to have connection with her whilst in a state of intoxication but, as she repelled him, he became angry and presented her to one of his negro-slaves whose upper lip was higher than his nostrils whilst the lower one hung down to his neck. His stature was such that the demon Sakhrah would have been put to flight and a fountain of pitch emitted stench from his armpits.

Thou wouldst say that, till the resurrection, ugliness
Is his stamp as that of Joseph was beauty.

With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,
As often before, the April fields till star-light
Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,
Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing
Like notes of music that run together, into winning,
In the inspired improvisation of love!
But to put back of us as a canticle ended
The rapt enchantment of the flesh,
In which our souls swooned, down, down,
Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves --

Upon her breast her hands and hair
Were tangled all together.
The moon of June forbade me not —
The golden night time weather
In balmy sighs commanded me
To kiss them like a feather.

Her looming hair, her burning hands,
Were tangled black and white.
My face I buried there. I pray —
So far from her to-night —
For grace, to dream I kiss her soul
Amid the black and white.

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,

Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.

This was the shining green canal
Where we came two by two
Walking at combat-interval.
Such trees we never knew.

The day was early June, the ground
Was soft and bright with dew.
Far away the guns did sound,
But here the sky was blue.

The sky was blue, but there a smoke
Hung still above the sea
Where the ships together spoke
To towns we could not see.

I

I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,
As they had looked at ashes; but a few—
Say five or six of us—had found somehow
The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,
Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,
By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life
And in his way had shared, with all mankind,
Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,
By some resplendent metamorphosis,

Blue and gold, and mist and sunlight,
Veils of colour blent and blown
In melodic monotone.
Dark and bright, and white and dun light
Clash and flash, as into one light
Trembling thro’ an opal stone,
Over green robes of the mountain
And the blue skirts of the sea,
Spreading from a sacred fountain
Hymeneal harmony.

Drums and trumpets of the ocean,
Oboe spirits of the wind,
Violins of forest kind,
Flutes that breathe the trees’ devotion,