Green Glass Beads Read online

  She is the darling of my heart,

  And she lives in our alley.

  My master and the neighbours all

  Make game of me and Sally,

  And, but for her, I’d better be

  A slave and row a galley;

  But when my seven long years are out,

  O, then I’ll marry Sally;

  O, then we’ll wed, and then we’ll bed,

  But not in our alley.

  Henry Carey

  Renouncement

  I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,

  I shun the thought that lurks in all delight –

  The thought of thee – and in the blue Heaven’s height,

  And in the sweetest passage of a song.

  O just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng

  This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;

  But it must never, never come in sight;

  I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

  But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,

  When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,

  And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,

  Must doff my will as raiment laid away,

  With the first dream that comes with the first sleep

  I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

  Alice Meynell

  A Quoi Bon Dire

  Seventeen years ago you said

  Something that sounded like Good-bye:

  And everybody thinks you are dead

  But I.

  So I as I grow stiff and cold

  To this and that say Good-bye too;

  And everybody sees that I am old

  But you.

  And one fine morning in a sunny lane

  Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear

  That nobody can love their way again

  While over there

  You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

  Charlotte Mew

  As I Walked Out One Evening

  As I walked out one evening,

  Walking down Bristol Street,

  The crowds upon the pavement

  Were fields of harvest wheat.

  And down by the brimming river

  I heard a lover sing

  Under an arch of the railway:

  ‘Love has no ending.

  ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

  Till China and Africa meet,

  And the river jumps over the mountain

  And the salmon sing in the street,

  ‘I’ll love you till the ocean

  Is folded and hung up to dry

  And the seven stars go squawking

  Like geese about the sky.

  ‘The years shall run like rabbits,

  For in my arms I hold

  The Flower of the Ages,

  And the first love of the world.’

  But all the clocks in the city

  Began to whirr and chime:

  ‘O let not Time deceive you,

  You cannot conquer Time.

  ‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

  Where Justice naked is,

  Time watches from the shadow

  And coughs when you would kiss.

  ‘In headaches and in worry

  Vaguely life leaks away,

  And Time will have his fancy

  Tomorrow or today.

  ‘Into many a green valley

  Drifts the appalling snow;

  Time breaks the threaded dances

  And the diver’s brilliant bow.

  ‘O plunge your hands in water,

  Plunge them in up to the wrist;

  Stare, stare in the basin

  And wonder what you’ve missed.

  ‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

  The desert sighs in the bed,

  And the crack in the teacup opens

  A lane to the land of the dead.

  ‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

  And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

  And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

  And Jill goes down on her back.

  ‘O look, look in the mirror,

  O look in your distress;

  Life remains a blessing

  Although you cannot bless.

  ‘O stand, stand at the window

  As the tears scald and start;

  You shall love your crooked neighbour

  With your crooked heart.’

  It was late, late in the evening,

  The lovers they were gone;

  The clocks had ceased their chiming,

  And the deep river ran on.

  W. H. Auden

  Sonnet 18

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

  And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

  And every fair from fair sometime declines,

  By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

  Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  William Shakespeare

  STORIES

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci

  ‘O what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge is wither’d from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  ‘O what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms,

  So haggard and so woebegone?

  The squirrel’s granary is full,

  And the harvest’s done.

  ‘I see a lily on thy brow

  With anguish moist and fever dew,

  And on thy cheek a fading rose

  Fast withereth too.’

  ‘I met a lady in the meads

  Full beautiful – a faery’s child,

  Her hair was long, her foot was light,

  And her eyes were wild.

  ‘I made a garland for her head,

  And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

  She look’d at me as she did love,

  And made sweet moan.

  ‘I set her on my pacing steed,

  And nothing else saw all day long,

  For sidelong would she bend and sing

  A faery’s song.

  ‘She found me roots of relish sweet,

  And honey wild and manna dew,

  And sure in language strange she said,

  “I love thee true.”

  ‘She took me to her elfin grot,

  And there she wept and sigh’d full sore;

  And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

  ‘And there she lulled me asleep,

  And there I dream’d – Ah! woe betide!

  The latest dream I ever dream’d

  On the cold hill’s side.

  ‘I saw pale kings and princes too,

  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:

  Who cried – “La Belle Dame sans Merci

  Hath thee in thrall!”

  ‘I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam

  With horrid warning gaped wide,

  And I awoke and found me here

  On the cold hill’s side.

  ‘And this is why I sojourn here

  Alone and palely loitering,

  Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,

  And no birds sing.’

  John Keats

  The Song of Wandering Aengus

  I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,