Selected Poems (102 page)

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Authors: Byron

Tags: #Literary Criticism, #Poetry, #General

BOOK: Selected Poems
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Her new-born Numa thou – with reign, alas! too brief.
CXV
Egeria! sweet creation of some heart
Which found no mortal resting-place so fair
As thine ideal breast; whate’er thou art

1030

Or wert, — a young Aurora of the air,
The nympholepsy of some fond despair;
Or, it might be, a beauty of the earth,
Who found a more than common votary there
Too much adoring; whatso’er thy birth,

1035

Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.
CXVI
The mosses of thy fountain still are sprinkled
With thine Elysian water-drops; the face
Of thy cave-guarded spring, with years unwrinkled,
Reflects the meek-eyed genius of the place,

1040

Whose green, wild margin now no more erase
Art’s works; nor must the delicate waters sleep,
Prison’d in marble, bubbling from the base
Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap
The rill runs o’er, and round, fern, flowers, and ivy, creep
CXVII

1045

Fantastically tangled; the green hills
Are clothed with early blossoms, through the grass
The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and the bills
Of summer-birds sing welcome as ye pass;
Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class,

1050

Implore the pausing step, and with their dyes
Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass;
The sweetness of the violet’s deep blue eyes,
Kiss’d by the breath of heaven, seems colour’d by its skies.
CXVIII
Here didst thou dwell, in this enchanted cover,

1055

Egeria! thy all heavenly bosom beating
For the far footsteps of thy mortal lover;
The purple Midnight veiled that mystic meeting
With her most starry canopy, and seating
Thyself by thine adorer, what befel?

1060

This cave was surely shaped out for the greeting
Of an enamoured Goddess, and the cell
Haunted by holy Love – the earliest oracle!
CXIX
And didst thou not, thy breast to his replying,
Blend a celestial with a human heart;

1065

And Love, which dies as it was born, in sighing,
Share with immortal transports? could thine art
Make them indeed immortal, and impart
The purity of heaven to earthly joys,
Expel the venom and not blunt the dart –

1070

The dull satiety which all destroys —
And root from out the soul the deadly weed which cloys?
CXX
Alas! our young affections run to waste,
Or water but the desert; whence arise
But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,

1075

Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes,
Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies,
And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants
Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies
O’er the world’s wilderness, and vainly pants

1080

For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.
CXXI
Oh Love! no habitant of earth thou art –
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e’er shall see

1085

The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquench’d soul — parch’d — wearied — wrung — and riven.
CXXII

1090

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation: – where,
Where are the forms the sculptor’s soul hath seized?
In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare

1095

Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreach’d Paradise of our despair,
Which o’er-informs the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?
CXXIII
Who loves, raves – ’tis youth’s frenzy – but the cure

1100

Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind’s
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,

1105

Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize – wealthiest when most undone.
CXXIV
We wither from our youth, we gasp away –
Sick – sick; unfound the boon – unslaked the thirst,

1110

Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first –
But all too late, – so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice – ’tis the same,
Each idle – and all ill – and none the worst –

1115

For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
CXXV
Few — none — find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed

1120

Antipathies — but to recur, ere long,
Envenom’d with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,

1125

Whose touch turns Hope to dust, – the dust we all have trod.
CXXVI
Our life is a false nature – ’tis not in
The harmony of things, - this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,

1130

Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew –
Disease, death, bondage – all the woes we see –
And worse, the woes we see not – which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.
CXXVII
1135Yet let us ponder boldly – ’tis a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought – our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty divine

1140

Is chain’d and tortured – cabin’d, cribb’d, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind.
CXXVIII
Arches on arches! as it were that Rome,

1145

Collecting the chief trophies of her line,
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome,
Her Coliseum stands; the moonbeams shine
As ’twere its natural torches, for divine
Should be the light which streams here, to illume

1150

This long-explored but still exhaustless mine
Of contemplation; and the azure gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume
CXXIX
Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven,
Floats o’er this vast and wondrous monument,

1155

And shadows forth its glory. There is given
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,
A spirit’s feeling, and where he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power
And magic in the ruin’d battlement

1160

For which the palace of the present hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.
CXXX
Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter
And only healer when the heart hath bled –

1165

Time! the corrector where our judgments err,
The test of truth, love, – sole philosopher,
For all beside are sophists, from thy thrift,
Which never loses though it doth defer —
Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift

1170

My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift:
CXXXI
Amidst this wreck, where thou hast made a shrine
And temple more divinely desolate,
Among thy mightier offerings here are mine,
Ruins of years – though few, yet full of fate: –

1175

If thou hast ever seen me too elate,
Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne
Good, and reserved my pride against the hate
Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn
This iron in my soul in vain – shall
they
not mourn?
CXXXII

1180

And thou, who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis!
Here, where the ancient paid thee homage long –
Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss

1185

For that unnatural retribution – just,
Had it but been from hands less near – in this
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!
Dost thou not hear my heart? – Awake! thou shalt, and must.
CXXXIII
It is not that I may not have incurr’d

1190

For my ancestral faults or mine the wound
I bleed withal, and, had it been conferr’d
With a just weapon, it had flow’d unbound;
But now my blood shall not sink in the ground;
To thee I do devote it –
thou
shalt take

1195

The vengeance, which shall yet be sought and found,
Which if
I
have not taken for the sake—
But let that pass – I sleep, but thou shalt yet awake
CXXXIV
And if my voice break forth, ’tis not that now
I shrink from what is suffer’d: let him speak

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