The Eagle (a fragment) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade ?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For through from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

From the North by Sara Teasdale

The northern woods are delicately sweet,
The lake is folded softly by the shore,
But I am restless for the subway’s roar,
The thunder and the hurrying of feet.
I try to sleep, but still my eyelids beat
Against the image of the tower that bore
Me high aloft, as if thru heaven’s door
I watched the world from God’s unshaken seat.
I would go back and breathe with quickened sense
The tunnel’s strong hot breath of powdered steel;
But at the ferries I should leave the tense
Dark air behind, and I should mount and be
One among many who are thrilled to feel
The first keen sea-breath from the open sea.

For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death by Sara Teasdale

(February 23, 1821)

At midnight when the moonlit cypress trees
Have woven round his grave a magic shade,
Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made,
There moves fresh Maia like a morning breeze
Blown over jonquil beds when warm rains cease.
And stooping where her poet’s head is laid,
Selene weeps while all the tides are stayed
And swaying seas are darkened into peace.
But they who wake the meadows and the tides
Have hearts too kind to bid him wake from sleep
Who murmurs sometimes when his dreams are deep,
Startling the Quiet Land where he abides,
And charming still, sad-eyed Persephone
With visions of the sunny earth and sea.

A Satirical Elegy; On the Death of a Late Famous General by Jonathan Swift

    His Grace! impossible! what, dead!
    Of old age too, and in his bed!
    And could that mighty warrior fall,
    And so inglorious, after all?
    Well, since he's gone, no matter how,
    The last loud trump must wake him now;
    And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
    He'd wish to sleep a little longer.
    And could he be indeed so old
    As by the newspapers we're told?
    Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
    'Twas time in conscience he should die!
    This world he cumber'd long enough;
    He burnt his candle to the snuff;
    And that's the reason, some folks think,
    He left behind so great a stink.
    Behold his funeral appears,
    Nor widows' sighs, nor orphans' tears,
    Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
    Attend the progress of his hearse.
    But what of that? his friends may say,
    He had those honours in his day.
    True to his profit and his pride,
    He made them weep before he died.
        Come hither, all ye empty things!
    Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings!
    Who float upon the tide of state;
    Come hither, and behold your fate!
    Let Pride be taught by this rebuke,
    How very mean a thing's a duke;
    From all his ill-got honours flung,
    Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.

[extra notes:]
The Duke of Marlborough died on the 16th June, 1722.

To Mary Wollstonecraft by Robert Southey

    The lilly cheek, the "purple light of love,"
    The liquid lustre of the melting eye,--
    Mary! of these the Poet sung, for these
    Did Woman triumph! with no angry frown
    View this degrading conquest. At that age
    No MAID OF ARC had snatch'd from coward man
    The heaven-blest sword of Liberty; thy sex
    Could boast no female ROLAND'S martyrdom;
    No CORDE'S angel and avenging arm
    Had sanctified again the Murderer's name
    As erst when Caesar perish'd: yet some strains
    May even adorn this theme, befitting me
    To offer, nor unworthy thy regard.

To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
    Bird thou never wert,
    That from Heaven, or near it,
    Pourest thy full heart
    In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

    Higher still and higher
    From the earth thou springest
    Like a cloud of fire;
    The blue deep thou wingest,
    And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

    In the golden lightning
    Of the sunken sun,
    O'er which clouds are bright'ning.
    Thou dost float and run;
    Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

    The pale purple even
    Melts around thy flight;
    Like a star of Heaven,
    In the broad daylight
    Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

    Keen as are the arrows
    Of that silver sphere,
    Whose intense lamp narrows
    In the white dawn clear
    Until we hardly see - we feel that it is there.

    All the earth and air
    With thy voice is loud,
    As, when night is bare,
    From one lonely cloud
    The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

    What thou art we know not;
    What is most like thee?
    From rainbow clouds there flow not
    Drops so bright to see
    As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

    Like a Poet hidden
    In the light of thought,
    Singing hymns unbidden,
    Till the world is wrought
    To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

    Like a high-born maiden
    In a palace-tower,
    Soothing her love-laden
    Soul in secret hour
    With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

    Like a glow-worm golden
    In a dell of dew,
    Scattering unbeholden
    Its aereal hue
    Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!

    Like a rose embowered
    In its own green leaves,
    By warm winds deflowered,
    Till the scent it gives
    Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

    Sound of vernal showers
    On the twinkling grass,
    Rain-awakened flowers,
    All that ever was
    Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:

    Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
    What sweet thoughts are thine:
    I have never heard
    Praise of love or wine
    That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

    Chorus Hymeneal,
    Or triumphal chant,
    Matched with thine would be all
    But an empty vaunt,
    A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

    What objects are the fountains
    Of thy happy strain?
    What fields, or waves, or mountains?
    What shapes of sky or plain?
    What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

    With thy clear keen joyance
    Languor cannot be:
    Shadow of annoyance
    Never came near thee:
    Thou lovest - but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

    Waking or asleep,
    Thou of death must deem
    Things more true and deep
    Than we mortals dream,
    Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

    We look before and after,
    And pine for what is not:
    Our sincerest laughter
    With some pain is fraught;
    Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

    Yet if we could scorn
    Hate, and pride, and fear;
    If we were things born
    Not to shed a tear,
    I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

    Better than all measures
    Of delightful sound,
    Better than all treasures
    That in books are found,
    Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

    Teach me half the gladness
    That thy brain must know,
    Such harmonious madness
    From my lips would flow
    The world should listen then - as I am listening now.

Lines Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    What! alive and so bold, O Earth?
    Art thou not overbold?
    What! leapest thou forth as of old
    In the light of thy morning mirth,
    The last of the flock of the starry fold?
    Ha! leapest thou forth as of old?
    Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled,
    And canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?

    How! is not thy quick heart cold?
    What spark is alive on thy hearth?
    How! is not HIS death-knell knolled?
    And livest THOU still, Mother Earth?
    Thou wert warming thy fingers old
    O'er the embers covered and cold
    Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled -
    What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead?

    'Who has known me of old,' replied Earth,
    'Or who has my story told?
    It is thou who art overbold.'
    And the lightning of scorn laughed forth
    As she sung, 'To my bosom I fold
    All my sons when their knell is knolled,
    And so with living motion all are fed,
    And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead.

    'Still alive and still bold,' shouted Earth,
    'I grow bolder and still more bold.
    The dead fill me ten thousandfold
    Fuller of speed, and splendour, and mirth.
    I was cloudy, and sullen, and cold,
    Like a frozen chaos uprolled,
    Till by the spirit of the mighty dead
    My heart grew warm. I feed on whom I fed.

    'Ay, alive and still bold.' muttered Earth,
    'Napoleon's fierce spirit rolled,
    In terror and blood and gold,
    A torrent of ruin to death from his birth.
    Leave the millions who follow to mould
    The metal before it be cold;
    And weave into his shame, which like the dead
    Shrouds me, the hopes that from his glory fled.'

A Summer Evening Churchyard by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
    Each vapour that obscured the sunset's ray;
    And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
    In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:
    Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,
    Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

    They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
    Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
    Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
    Responding to the charm with its own mystery.
    The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
    Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

    Thou too, aereal Pile! whose pinnacles
    Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
    Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,
    Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
    Around whose lessening and invisible height
    Gather among the stars the clouds of night.

    The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:
    And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,
    Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
    Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,
    And mingling with the still night and mute sky
    Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

    Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild
    And terrorless as this serenest night:
    Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
    Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
    Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
    That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    1.
    O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
    Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
    Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

    Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
    Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
    Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

    The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
    Each like a corpse within its grave, until
    Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

    Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
    (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
    With living hues and odours plain and hill:

    Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
    Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

    2.
    Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
    Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
    Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

    Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
    On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
    Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

    Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
    Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
    The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

    Of the dying year, to which this closing night
    Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
    Vaulted with all thy congregated might

    Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
    Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

    3.
    Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
    The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
    Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

    Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
    And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
    Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

    All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
    So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
    For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

    Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
    The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
    The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

    Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
    And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

    4.
    If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
    If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
    A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

    The impulse of thy strength, only less free
    Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
    I were as in my boyhood, and could be

    The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
    As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
    Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

    As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
    Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
    I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

    A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
    One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

    5.
    Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
    What if my leaves are falling like its own!
    The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

    Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
    Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
    My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

    Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
    Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
    And, by the incantation of this verse,

    Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
    Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
    Be through my lips to unawakened earth

    The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
    If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? by William Shakespeare

    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.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert W. Service

    A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
    The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
    Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
    And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

    When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
    There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty and loaded for bear.
    He looked like a man with a foot in the grave, and scarcely the strength of a louse,
    Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
    There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
    But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

    There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
    And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
    With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
    As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
    Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
    And I turned my head - and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou.

    His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
    Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
    The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
    So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
    In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
    Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands - my God! but that man could play!

    Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
    And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
    With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
    A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
    While high overhead, green, yellow, and red, the North Lights swept in bars -
    Then you've a haunch what the music meant ... hunger and night and the stars.

    And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans;
    But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
    For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
    But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love;
    A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true -
    (God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, - the lady that's known as Lou.)

    Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
    But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
    That some one had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie;
    That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.
    'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through and through -
    "I guess I'll make it a spread misere," said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

    The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood;
    And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.
    The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
    And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash,

    And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
    In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
    Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm;
    And, "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
    But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
    That one of you is a hound of hell ... and that one is Dan McGrew."

    Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark;
    And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark;
    Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
    While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou.

    These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know;
    They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it's so.
    I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two -
    The woman that kissed him and - pinched his poke - was the lady that's known as Lou.

The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service

    There are strange things done in the midnight sun
    By the men who moil for gold;
    The Arctic trails have their secret tales
    That would make your blood run cold;
    The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
    But the queerest they ever did see
    Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
    I cremated Sam McGee.

    Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
    Why he left his home in the South to roam round the Pole God only knows.
    He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
    Though he'd often say in his homely way that he'd "sooner live in hell."

    On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
    Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
    If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze, till sometimes we couldn't see;
    It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

    And that very night as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
    And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
    He turned to me, and, "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
    And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

    Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no: then he says with a sort of moan:
    "It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
    Yet 'taint being dead, it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains:
    So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

    A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
    And we started on at the streak of dawn, but God! he looked ghastly pale.
    He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
    And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

    There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror driven,
    With a corpse half-hid that I couldn't get rid because of a promise given;
    It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
    But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

    Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
    In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
    In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
    Howled out their woes to the homeless snows - O God! how I loathed the thing!

    And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
    And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
    The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
    And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

    Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
    It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."
    And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum:
    Then, "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

    Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
    Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
    The flames just soared, and the furnace roared - such a blaze you seldom see;
    And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

    Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
    And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
    It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
    And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

    I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
    But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
    I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
    I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked," ... then the door I opened wide.

    And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
    And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
    It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm -
    Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

    There are strange things done in the midnight sun
    By the men who moil for gold;
    The Arctic trails have their secret tales
    That would make your blood run cold;
    The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
    But the queerest they ever did see
    Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
    I cremated Sam McGee.