From 0ff5cf16a98f7785b3cf623e6c1df1bf2485a896 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Thomas Morris Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:46:31 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] added george --- README.rst | 2 +- poems/data/poems.json | 807 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------- 2 files changed, 680 insertions(+), 129 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst index ac9a2be..bef4520 100644 --- a/README.rst +++ b/README.rst @@ -1,3 +1,3 @@ -All of the poems in here are good, or interesting. There are currently 9,000 poems in 44 (3.581) languages by 592 (255.336) authors from 82 (13.652) countries. +All of the poems in here are good, or interesting. There are currently 9,010 poems in 44 (3.590) languages by 593 (256.035) authors from 82 (13.675) countries. (The quantites in the parentheses are the effective counts, based on the entropy of the distribution over the poems.) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/poems/data/poems.json b/poems/data/poems.json index fe82491..5cf701a 100644 --- a/poems/data/poems.json +++ b/poems/data/poems.json @@ -7181,7 +7181,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Balliol College", + "college": "Balliol College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -7203,11 +7203,35 @@ ] }, "poems": { + "anti-desperation": { + "title": "“Anti-Desperation”", + "body": "Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,\nHow angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!\n“Christ,” some one says, “was human as we are;\nNo judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;”\n\n“We live no more, when we have done our span.”\n“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?\nFrom sin which Heaven records not, why forbear?\nLive we like brutes our life without a plan!”\n\nSo answerest thou; but why not rather say,--\n“Hath man no second life? _Pitch this one high!_\nSits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?\n\n_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_\nWas Christ a man like us? _Ah! let us try_\n_If we then, too, can be such men as he!_”", + "metadata": { + "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, + "tags": [ + "English" + ] + } + }, "bacchanalia": { "title": "“Bacchanalia”", "body": "# I.\n\nThe evening comes, the fields are still.\nThe tinkle of the thirsty rill,\nUnheard all day, ascends again;\nDeserted is the half-mown plain,\nSilent the swaths; the ringing wain,\nThe mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms,\nAll housed within the sleeping farms.\nThe business of the day is done,\nThe last-left haymaker is gone.\nAnd from the thyme upon the height,\nAnd from the elder-blossom white\nAnd pale dog-roses in the hedge,\nAnd from the mint-plant in the sedge,\nIn puffs of balm the night-air blows\nThe perfume which the day foregoes.\nAnd on the pure horizon far,\nSee, pulsing with the first-born star,\nThe liquid sky above the hill!\nThe evening comes, the fields are still.\n\nLoitering and leaping,\nWith saunter, with bounds,\nFlickering and circling\nIn files and in rounds,\nGayly their pine-staff green\nTossing in air,\nLoose o’er their shoulders white\nShowering their hair,\nSee! the wild Maenads\nBreak from the wood,\nYouth and Iacchus\nMaddening their blood.\nSee! through the quiet land\nRioting they pass,\nFling the fresh heaps about,\nTrample the grass,\nTear from the rifled hedge\nGarlands, their prize;\nFill with their sports the field,\nFill with their cries.\n\nShepherd, what ails thee, then?\nShepherd, why mute?\nForth with thy joyous song!\nForth with thy flute!\nTempts not the revel blithe?\nLure not their cries?\nGlow not their shoulders smooth?\nMelt not their eyes?\nIs not, on cheeks like those,\nLovely the flush?\n--_Ah! so the quiet was!\nSo was the hush!_\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe epoch ends, the world is still.\nThe age has talked and worked its fill.\nThe famous orators have shone,\nThe famous poets sung and gone,\nThe famous men of war have fought,\nThe famous speculators thought,\nThe famous players, sculptors, wrought,\nThe famous painters filled their wall,\nThe famous critics judged it all.\nThe combatants are parted now;\nUphung the spear, unbent the bow,\nThe puissant crowned, the weak laid low.\nAnd in the after-silence sweet,\nNow strifes are hushed, our ears doth meet,\nAscending pure, the bell-like fame\nOf this or that down-trodden name,\nDelicate spirits, pushed away\nIn the hot press of the noonday.\nAnd o’er the plain, where the dead age\nDid its now-silent warfare wage,--\nO’er that wide plain, now wrapped in gloom,\nWhere many a splendor finds its tomb,\nMany spent fames and fallen nights nights--\nThe one or two immortal lights\nRise slowly up into the sky,\nTo shine there everlastingly,\nLike stars over the bounding hill.\nThe epoch ends, the world is still.\n\nThundering and bursting\nIn torrents, in waves,\nCarolling and shouting\nOver tombs, amid graves,\nSee! on the cumbered plain\nClearing a stage,\nScattering the past about,\nComes the new age.\nBards make new poems,\nThinkers new schools,\nStatesmen new systems,\nCritics new rules.\nAll things begin again;\nLife is their prize;\nEarth with their deeds they fill,\nFill with their cries.\n\nPoet, what ails thee, then?\nSay, why so mute?\nForth with thy praising voice!\nForth with thy flute!\nLoiterer! why sittest thou\nSunk in thy dream?\nTempts not the bright new age?\nShines not its stream?\nLook, ah! what genius,\nArt, science, wit!\nSoldiers like Caesar,\nStatesmen like Pitt!\nSculptors like Phidias,\nRaphaels in shoals,\nPoets like Shakspeare,--\nBeautiful souls!\nSee, on their glowing cheeks\nHeavenly the flush!\n--_Ah! so the silence was!\nSo was the hush!_\n\nThe world but feels the present’s spell:\nThe poet feels the past as well;\nWhatever men have done, might do,\nWhatever thought, might think it too.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7216,21 +7240,18 @@ } } }, - "the-better-part": { - "title": "“The Better Part”", - "body": "Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,\nHow angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!\n“Christ,” some one says, “was human as we are;\nNo judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;”\n\n“We live no more, when we have done our span.”\n“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?\nFrom sin which Heaven records not, why forbear?\nLive we like brutes our life without a plan!”\n\nSo answerest thou; but why not rather say,--\n“Hath man no second life? _Pitch this one high!_\nSits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?\n\n_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_\nWas Christ a man like us? _Ah! let us try_\n_If we then, too, can be such men as he!_”", - "metadata": { - "language": "English", - "tags": [ - "English" - ] - } - }, "the-buried-life": { "title": "“The Buried Life”", "body": "Light flows our war of mocking words; and yet,\nBehold, with tears mine eyes are wet!\nI feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.\nYes, yes, we know that we can jest,\nWe know, we know that we can smile!\nBut there’s a something in this breast,\nTo which thy light words bring no rest,\nAnd thy gay smiles no anodyne;\nGive me thy hand, and hush awhile,\nAnd turn those limpid eyes on mine,\nAnd let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.\n\nAlas! is even love too weak\nTo unlock the heart, and let it speak?\nAre even lovers powerless to reveal\nTo one another what indeed they feel?\n\nI knew the mass of men concealed\nTheir thoughts, for fear that if revealed\nThey would by other men be met\nWith blank indifference, or with blame reproved;\nI knew they lived and moved\nTricked in disguises, alien to the rest\nOf men, and alien to themselves--and yet\nThe same heart beats in every human breast!\n\nBut we, my love! doth a like spell benumb\nOur hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?\n\nAh! well for us, if even we,\nEven for a moment, can get free\nOur heart, and have our lips unchained;\nFor that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!\n\nFate, which foresaw\nHow frivolous a baby man would be,--\nBy what distractions he would be possessed,\nHow he would pour himself in every strife,\nAnd well-nigh change his own identity,--\nThat it might keep from his capricious play\nHis genuine self, and force him to obey\nEven in his own despite his being’s law,\nBade through the deep recesses of our breast\nThe unregarded river of our life\nPursue with indiscernible flow its way;\nAnd that we should not see\nThe buried stream, and seem to be\nEddying at large in blind uncertainty,\nThough driving on with it eternally.\n\nBut often, in the world’s most crowded streets,\nBut often, in the din of strife,\nThere rises an unspeakable desire\nAfter the knowledge of our buried life;\nA thirst to spend our fire and restless force\nIn tracking out our true, original course;\nA longing to inquire\nInto the mystery of this heart which beats\nSo wild, so deep in us,--to know\nWhence our lives come, and where they go.\nAnd many a man in his own breast then delves,\nBut deep enough, alas! none ever mines.\nAnd we have been on many thousand lines,\nAnd we have shown, on each, spirit and power;\nBut hardly have we, for one little hour,\nBeen on our own line, have we been ourselves,--\nHardly had skill to utter one of all\nThe nameless feelings that course through our breast,\nBut they course on forever unexpressed.\nAnd long we try in vain to speak and act\nOur hidden self, and what we say and do\nIs eloquent, is well--but ’tis not true!\nAnd then we will no more be racked\nWith inward striving, and demand\nOf all the thousand nothings of the hour\nTheir stupefying power;\nAh, yes, and they benumb us at our call!\nYet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,\nFrom the soul’s subterranean depth upborne\nAs from an infinitely distant land,\nCome airs, and floating echoes, and convey\nA melancholy into all our day.\n\nOnly--but this is rare--\nWhen a beloved hand is laid in ours,\nWhen, jaded with the rush and glare\nOf the interminable hours,\nOur eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,\nWhen our world-deafened ear\nIs by the tones of a loved voice caressed,--\nA bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,\nAnd a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.\nThe eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,\nAnd what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.\n\nA man becomes aware of his life’s flow,\nAnd hears its winding murmur, and he sees\nThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.\n\nAnd there arrives a lull in the hot race\nWherein he doth forever chase\nThe flying and elusive shadow, rest.\nAn air of coolness plays upon his face,\nAnd an unwonted calm pervades his breast;\nAnd then he thinks he knows\nThe hills where his life rose,\nAnd the sea where it goes.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Empedocles On Etna, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1852" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] @@ -7241,6 +7262,13 @@ "body": "# I. _The Castle_\n\nDown the Savoy valleys sounding,\nEchoing round this castle old,\n’Mid the distant mountain-chalets\nHark! what bell for church is tolled?\n\nIn the bright October morning\nSavoy’s Duke had left his bride.\nFrom the castle, past the drawbridge,\nFlowed the hunters’ merry tide.\n\nSteeds are neighing, gallants glittering.\nGay, her smiling lord to greet,\nFrom her mullioned chamber-casement\nSmiles the Duchess Marguerite.\n\nFrom Vienna, by the Danube,\nHere she came, a bride, in spring.\nNow the autumn crisps the forest;\nHunters gather, bugles ring.\n\nHounds are pulling, prickers swearing,\nHorses fret, and boar-spears glance.\nOff!--They sweep the marshy forests,\nWestward on the side of France.\n\nHark! the game’s on foot; they scatter!\nDown the forest-ridings lone,\nFurious, single horsemen gallop.\nHark! a shout--a crash--a groan!\n\nPale and breathless, came the hunters--\nOn the turf dead lies the boar.\nGod! the duke lies stretched beside him,\nSenseless, weltering in his gore.\n\nIn the dull October evening,\nDown the leaf-strewn forest-road,\nTo the castle, past the drawbridge,\nCame the hunters with their load.\n\nIn the hall, with sconces blazing,\nLadies waiting round her seat,\nClothed in smiles, beneath the dais\nSate the Duchess Marguerite.\n\nHark! below the gates unbarring!\nTramp of men, and quick commands!\n“’Tis my lord come back from hunting;”\nAnd the duchess claps her hands.\n\nSlow and tired, came the hunters;\nStopped in darkness in the court.\n“Ho, this way, ye laggard hunters!\nTo the hall! What sport, what sport?”\n\nSlow they entered with their master;\nIn the hall they laid him down.\nOn his coat were leaves and blood-stains,\nOn his brow an angry frown.\n\nDead her princely youthful husband\nLay before his youthful wife,\nBloody ’neath the flaring sconces--\nAnd the sight froze all her life.\n\nIn Vienna, by the Danube,\nKings hold revel, gallants meet.\nGay of old amid the gayest\nWas the Duchess Marguerite.\n\nIn Vienna, by the Danube,\nFeast and dance her youth beguiled.\nTill that hour she never sorrowed;\nBut from then she never smiled.\n\n’Mid the Savoy mountain-valleys,\nFar from town or haunt of man,\nStands a lonely church, unfinished,\nWhich the Duchess Maud began.\n\nOld, that duchess stern began it,\nIn gray age, with palsied hands;\nBut she died while it was building,\nAnd the church unfinished stands,--\n\nStands as erst the builders left it,\nWhen she sank into her grave;\nMountain greensward paves the chancel,\nHarebells flower in the nave.\n\n“In my castle all is sorrow,”\nSaid the Duchess Marguerite then:\n“Guide me, some one, to the mountain;\nWe will build the church again.”\n\nSandalled palmers, faring homeward,\nAustrian knights from Syria came.\n“Austrian wanderers bring, O warders!\nHomage to your Austrian dame.”\n\nFrom the gate the warders answered,--\n“Gone, O knights, is she you knew!\nDead our duke, and gone his duchess;\nSeek her at the church of Brou.”\n\nAustrian knights and march-worn palmers\nClimb the winding mountain-way;\nReach the valley, where the fabric\nRises higher day by day.\n\nStones are sawing, hammers ringing;\nOn the work the bright sun shines;\nIn the Savoy mountain-meadows,\nBy the stream, below the pines.\n\nOn her palfrey white the duchess\nSate, and watched her working train,--\nFlemish carvers, Lombard gilders,\nGerman masons, smiths from Spain.\n\nClad in black, on her white palfrey,\nHer old architect beside,--\nThere they found her in the mountains,\nMorn and noon and eventide.\n\nThere she sate, and watched the builders,\nTill the church was roofed and done;\nLast of all, the builders reared her\nIn the nave a tomb of stone.\n\nOn the tomb two forms they sculptured,\nLifelike in the marble pale,--\nOne, the duke in helm and armor;\nOne, the duchess in her veil.\n\nRound the tomb the carved stone fret-work\nWas at Easter-tide put on.\nThen the duchess closed her labors;\nAnd she died at the St. John.\n\n\n# II. _The Church_\n\nUpon the glistening leaden roof\nOf the new pile, the sunlight shines;\nThe stream goes leaping by.\nThe hills are clothed with pines sun-proof;\n’Mid bright green fields, below the pines,\nStands the church on high.\nWhat church is this, from men aloof?\n’Tis the Church of Brou.\n\nAt sunrise, from their dewy lair\nCrossing the stream, the kine are seen\nRound the wall to stray,--\nThe churchyard wall that clips the square\nOf open hill-sward fresh and green\nWhere last year they lay.\nBut all things now are ordered fair\nRound the Church of Brou.\n\nOn Sundays, at the matin-chime,\nThe Alpine peasants, two and three,\nClimb up here to pray;\nBurghers and dames, at summer’s prime,\nRide out to church from Chambery,\nDight with mantles gay.\nBut else it is a lonely time\nRound the Church of Brou.\n\nOn Sundays, too, a priest doth come\nFrom the walled town beyond the pass,\nDown the mountain-way;\nAnd then you hear the organ’s hum,\nYou hear the white-robed priest say mass,\nAnd the people pray.\nBut else the woods and fields are dumb\nRound the Church of Brou.\n\nAnd after church, when mass is done,\nThe people to the nave repair\nRound the tomb to stray;\nAnd marvel at the forms of stone,\nAnd praise the chiselled broideries rare--\nThen they drop away.\nThe princely pair are left alone\nIn the Church of Brou.\n\n\n# III. _The Tomb_\n\nSo rest, forever rest, O princely pair!\nIn your high church, ’mid the still mountain-air,\nWhere horn, and hound, and vassals, never come.\nOnly the blessed saints are smiling dumb\nFrom the rich painted windows of the nave\nOn aisle, and transept, and your marble grave;\nWhere thou, young prince, shalt never more arise\nFrom the fringed mattress where thy duchess lies,\nOn autumn-mornings, when the bugle sounds,\nAnd ride across the drawbridge with thy hounds\nTo hunt the boar in the crisp woods till eve;\nAnd thou, O princess, shalt no more receive,\nThou and thy ladies, in the hall of state,\nThe jaded hunters with their bloody freight,\nComing benighted to the castle-gate.\nSo sleep, forever sleep, O marble pair!\nOr, if ye wake, let it be then, when fair\nOn the carved western front a flood of light\nStreams from the setting sun, and colors bright\nProphets, transfigured saints, and martyrs brave,\nIn the vast western window of the nave;\nAnd on the pavement round the tomb there glints\nA checker-work of glowing sapphire-tints,\nAnd amethyst, and ruby,--then unclose\nYour eyelids on the stone where ye repose,\nAnd from your broidered pillows lift your heads,\nAnd rise upon your cold white marble beds;\nAnd looking down on the warm rosy tints\nWhich checker, at your feet, the illumined flints,\nSay, _What is this? we are in bliss--forgiven--\nBehold the pavement of the courts of heaven!_\nOr let it be on autumn-nights, when rain\nDoth rustlingly above your heads complain\nOn the smooth leaden roof, and on the walls\nShedding her pensive light at intervals\nThe moon through the clere-story windows shines,\nAnd the wind washes through the mountain-pines,--\nThen, gazing up ’mid the dim pillars high,\nThe foliaged marble forest where ye lie,\n_Hush_, ye will say, _it is eternity!\nThis is the glimmering verge of heaven, and these\nThe columns of the heavenly palaces._\nAnd in the sweeping of the wind your ear\nThe passage of the angels’ wings will hear,\nAnd on the lichen-crusted leads above\nThe rustle of the eternal rain of love.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7254,6 +7282,13 @@ "body": "Mist clogs the sunshine.\nSmoky dwarf houses\nHem me round everywhere;\nA vague dejection\nWeighs down my soul.\n\nYet, while I languish,\nEverywhere countless\nProspects unroll themselves,\nAnd countless beings\nPass countless moods.\n\nFar hence, in Asia,\nOn the smooth convent-roofs,\nOn the gold terraces,\nOf holy Lassa,\nBright shines the sun.\n\nGray time-worn marbles\nHold the pure Muses;\nIn their cool gallery,\nBy yellow Tiber,\nThey still look fair.\n\nStrange unloved uproar\nShrills round their portal;\nYet not on Helicon\nKept they more cloudless\nTheir noble calm.\n\nThrough sun-proof alleys\nIn a lone, sand-hemmed\nCity of Africa,\nA blind, led beggar,\nAge-bowed, asks alms.\n\nNo bolder robber\nErst abode ambushed\nDeep in the sandy waste;\nNo clearer eyesight\nSpied prey afar.\n\nSaharan sand-winds\nSeared his keen eyeballs;\nSpent is the spoil he won.\nFor him the present\nHolds only pain.\n\nTwo young, fair lovers,\nWhere the warm June-wind,\nFresh from the summer fields\nPlays fondly round them,\nStand, tranced in joy.\n\nWith sweet, joined voices,\nAnd with eyes brimming,\n“Ah!” they cry, “Destiny,\nProlong the present!\nTime, stand still here!”\n\nThe prompt stern goddess\nShakes her head, frowning:\nTime gives his hour-glass\nIts due reversal;\nTheir hour is gone.\n\nWith weak indulgence\nDid the just goddess\nLengthen their happiness,\nShe lengthened also\nDistress elsewhere.\n\nThe hour whose happy\nUnalloyed moments\nI would eternalize,\nTen thousand mourners\nWell pleased see end.\n\nThe bleak, stern hour,\nWhose severe moments\nI would annihilate,\nIs passed by others\nIn warmth, light, joy.\n\nTime, so complained of,\nWho to no one man\nShows partiality,\nBrings round to all men\nSome undimmed hours.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Empedocles On Etna, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1852" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7267,16 +7302,30 @@ "body": "The sea is calm to-night.\nThe tide is full, the moon lies fair\nUpon the straits; on the French coast, the light\nGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,\nGlimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.\n\nCome to the window, sweet is the night-air!\nOnly, from the long line of spray\nWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched sand,\nListen! you hear the grating roar\nOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,\nAt their return, up the high strand,\nBegin and cease, and then again begin,\nWith tremulous cadence slow, and bring\nThe eternal note of sadness in.\n\nSophocles long ago\nHeard it on the Aegean, and it brought\nInto his mind the turbid ebb and flow\nOf human misery: we\nFind also in the sound a thought,\nHearing it by this distant northern sea.\n\nThe sea of faith\nWas once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore\nLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.\nBut now I only hear\nIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,\nRetreating, to the breath\nOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drear\nAnd naked shingles of the world.\n\nAh, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;\nAnd we are here as on a darkling plain\nSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,\nWhere ignorant armies clash by night.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] } }, - "the-future": { - "title": "“The Future”", - "body": "A wanderer is man from his birth.\nHe was born in a ship\nOn the breast of the river of Time;\nBrimming with wonder and joy,\nHe spreads out his arms to the light,\nRivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.\n\nAs what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.\nWhether he wakes\nWhere the snowy mountainous pass,\nEchoing the screams of the eagles,\nHems in its gorges the bed\nOf the new-born, clear-flowing stream;\nWhether he first sees light\nWhere the river in gleaming rings\nSluggishly winds through the plain;\nWhether in sound of the swallowing sea,--\nAs is the world on the banks,\nSo is the mind of the man.\n\nVainly does each, as he glides,\nFable and dream\nOf the lands which the river of Time\nHad left ere he woke on its breast,\nOr shall reach when his eyes have been closed.\nOnly the tract where he sails\nHe wots of; only the thoughts,\nRaised by the objects he passes, are his.\n\nWho can see the green earth any more\nAs she was by the sources of Time?\nWho imagines her fields as they lay\nIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?\nWho thinks as they thought,\nThe tribes who then roamed on her breast,\nHer vigorous, primitive sons?\n\nWhat girl\nNow reads in her bosom as clear\nAs Rebekah read, when she sate\nAt eve by the palm-shaded well?\nWho guards in her breast\nAs deep, as pellucid a spring\nOf feeling, as tranquil, as sure?\n\nWhat bard,\nAt the height of his vision, can deem\nOf God, of the world, of the soul,\nWith a plainness as near,\nAs flashing, as Moses felt,\nWhen he lay in the night by his flock\nOn the starlit Arabian waste?\nCan rise and obey\nThe beck of the Spirit like him?\n\nThis tract which the river of Time\nNow flows through with us, is the plain.\nGone is the calm of its earlier shore.\nBordered by cities, and hoarse\nWith a thousand cries is its stream.\nAnd we on its breast, our minds\nAre confused as the cries which we hear,\nChanging and short as the sights which we see.\n\nAnd we say that repose has fled\nForever the course of the river of Time.\nThat cities will crowd to its edge\nIn a blacker, incessanter line;\nThat the din will be more on its banks,\nDenser the trade on its stream,\nFlatter the plain where it flows,\nFiercer the sun overhead;\nThat never will those on its breast\nSee an ennobling sight,\nDrink of the feeling of quiet again.\n\nBut what was before us we know not,\nAnd we know not what shall succeed.\n\nHaply, the river of Time--\nAs it grows, as the towns on its marge\nFling their wavering lights\nOn a wider, statelier stream--\nMay acquire, if not the calm\nOf its early mountainous shore,\nYet a solemn peace of its own.\n\nAnd the width of the waters, the hush\nOf the gray expanse where he floats,\nFreshening its current, and spotted with foam\nAs it draws to the ocean, may strike\nPeace to the soul of the man on its breast,--\nAs the pale waste widens around him,\nAs the banks fade dimmer away,\nAs the stars come out, and the night-wind\nBrings up the stream\nMurmurs and scents of the infinite sea.", + "from-empedocles-on-etna": { + "title": "From “Empedocles on Etna”", + "body": "Is it so small a thing\nTo have enjoy’d the sun,\nTo have lived light in the spring,\nTo have loved, to have thought, to have done;\nTo have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;\n\nThat we must feign a bliss\nOf doubtful future date,\nAnd while we dream on this\nLose all our present state,\nAnd relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?\n\nNot much, I know, you prize\nWhat pleasures may be had,\nWho look on life with eyes\nEstranged, like mine, and sad:\nAnd yet the village churl feels the truth more than you;\n\nWho ’s loth to leave this life\nWhich to him little yields:\nHis hard-task’d sunburnt wife,\nHis often-labour’d fields;\nThe boors with whom he talk’d, the country spots he knew.\n\nBut thou, because thou hear’st\nMen scoff at Heaven and Fate;\nBecause the gods thou fear’st\nFail to make blest thy state,\nTremblest, and wilt not dare to trust the joys there are.\n\nI say, Fear not! life still\nLeaves human effort scope.\nBut, since life teems with ill,\nNurse no extravagant hope.\nBecause thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Empedocles On Etna, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1852" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7285,21 +7334,18 @@ } } }, - "growing-old": { - "title": "“Growing Old”", - "body": "What is it to grow old?\nIs it to lose the glory of the form,\nThe lustre of the eye?\nIs it for beauty to forego her wreath?\n--Yes, but not this alone.\n\nIs it to feel our strength--\nNot our bloom only, but our strength--decay?\nIs it to feel each limb\nGrow stiffer, every function less exact,\nEach nerve more loosely strung?\n\nYes, this, and more; but not,\nAh! ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be.\n’Tis not to have our life\nMellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,--\nA golden day’s decline.\n\n’Tis not to see the world\nAs from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,\nAnd heart profoundly stirred;\nAnd weep, and feel the fulness of the past,\nThe years that are no more.\n\nIt is to spend long days,\nAnd not once feel that we were ever young;\nIt is to add, immured\nIn the hot prison of the present, month\nTo month with weary pain.\n\nIt is to suffer this,\nAnd feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.\nDeep in our hidden heart\nFesters the dull remembrance of a change,\nBut no emotion,--none.\n\nIt is--last stage of all--\nWhen we are frozen up within, and quite\nThe phantom of ourselves,\nTo hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,\nWhich blamed the living man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "English", - "tags": [ - "English" - ] - } - }, - "from-the-hymn-of-empedocles": { - "title": "From “The Hymn of Empedocles”", - "body": "Is it so small a thing\nTo have enjoy’d the sun,\nTo have lived light in the spring,\nTo have loved, to have thought, to have done;\nTo have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;\n\nThat we must feign a bliss\nOf doubtful future date,\nAnd while we dream on this\nLose all our present state,\nAnd relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?\n\nNot much, I know, you prize\nWhat pleasures may be had,\nWho look on life with eyes\nEstranged, like mine, and sad:\nAnd yet the village churl feels the truth more than you;\n\nWho ‘s loth to leave this life\nWhich to him little yields:\nHis hard-task’d sunburnt wife,\nHis often-labour’d fields;\nThe boors with whom he talk’d, the country spots he knew.\n\nBut thou, because thou hear’st\nMen scoff at Heaven and Fate;\nBecause the gods thou fear’st\nFail to make blest thy state,\nTremblest, and wilt not dare to trust the joys there are.\n\nI say, Fear not! life still\nLeaves human effort scope.\nBut, since life teems with ill,\nNurse no extravagant hope.\nBecause thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair.", + "the-future": { + "title": "“The Future”", + "body": "A wanderer is man from his birth.\nHe was born in a ship\nOn the breast of the river of Time;\nBrimming with wonder and joy,\nHe spreads out his arms to the light,\nRivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.\n\nAs what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.\nWhether he wakes\nWhere the snowy mountainous pass,\nEchoing the screams of the eagles,\nHems in its gorges the bed\nOf the new-born, clear-flowing stream;\nWhether he first sees light\nWhere the river in gleaming rings\nSluggishly winds through the plain;\nWhether in sound of the swallowing sea,--\nAs is the world on the banks,\nSo is the mind of the man.\n\nVainly does each, as he glides,\nFable and dream\nOf the lands which the river of Time\nHad left ere he woke on its breast,\nOr shall reach when his eyes have been closed.\nOnly the tract where he sails\nHe wots of; only the thoughts,\nRaised by the objects he passes, are his.\n\nWho can see the green earth any more\nAs she was by the sources of Time?\nWho imagines her fields as they lay\nIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?\nWho thinks as they thought,\nThe tribes who then roamed on her breast,\nHer vigorous, primitive sons?\n\nWhat girl\nNow reads in her bosom as clear\nAs Rebekah read, when she sate\nAt eve by the palm-shaded well?\nWho guards in her breast\nAs deep, as pellucid a spring\nOf feeling, as tranquil, as sure?\n\nWhat bard,\nAt the height of his vision, can deem\nOf God, of the world, of the soul,\nWith a plainness as near,\nAs flashing, as Moses felt,\nWhen he lay in the night by his flock\nOn the starlit Arabian waste?\nCan rise and obey\nThe beck of the Spirit like him?\n\nThis tract which the river of Time\nNow flows through with us, is the plain.\nGone is the calm of its earlier shore.\nBordered by cities, and hoarse\nWith a thousand cries is its stream.\nAnd we on its breast, our minds\nAre confused as the cries which we hear,\nChanging and short as the sights which we see.\n\nAnd we say that repose has fled\nForever the course of the river of Time.\nThat cities will crowd to its edge\nIn a blacker, incessanter line;\nThat the din will be more on its banks,\nDenser the trade on its stream,\nFlatter the plain where it flows,\nFiercer the sun overhead;\nThat never will those on its breast\nSee an ennobling sight,\nDrink of the feeling of quiet again.\n\nBut what was before us we know not,\nAnd we know not what shall succeed.\n\nHaply, the river of Time--\nAs it grows, as the towns on its marge\nFling their wavering lights\nOn a wider, statelier stream--\nMay acquire, if not the calm\nOf its early mountainous shore,\nYet a solemn peace of its own.\n\nAnd the width of the waters, the hush\nOf the gray expanse where he floats,\nFreshening its current, and spotted with foam\nAs it draws to the ocean, may strike\nPeace to the soul of the man on its breast,--\nAs the pale waste widens around him,\nAs the banks fade dimmer away,\nAs the stars come out, and the night-wind\nBrings up the stream\nMurmurs and scents of the infinite sea.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7308,17 +7354,21 @@ } } }, - "isolation": { - "title": "“Isolation”", - "body": "We were apart: yet, day by day,\nI bade my heart more constant be.\nI bade it keep the world away,\nAnd grow a home for only thee;\nNor feared but thy love likewise grew,\nLike mine, each day, more tried, more true.\n\nThe fault was grave! I might have known,\nWhat far too soon, alas! I learned,--\nThe heart can bind itself alone,\nAnd faith may oft be unreturned.\nSelf-swayed our feelings ebb and swell.\nThou lov’st no more. Farewell! Farewell!\n\nFarewell!--And thou, thou lonely heart,\nWhich never yet without remorse\nEven for a moment didst depart\nFrom thy remote and spherèd course\nTo haunt the place where passions reign,--\nBack to thy solitude again!\n\nBack! with the conscious thrill of shame\nWhich Luna felt, that summer-night,\nFlash through her pure immortal frame,\nWhen she forsook the starry height\nTo hang o’er Endymion’s sleep\nUpon the pine-grown Latmian steep.\n\nYet she, chaste queen, had never proved\nHow vain a thing is mortal love,\nWandering in heaven, far removed;\nBut thou hast long had place to prove\nThis truth,--to prove, and make thine own:\n“Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”\n\nOr, if not quite alone, yet they\nWhich touch thee are unmating things,--\nOcean and clouds and night and day;\nLorn autumns and triumphant springs;\nAnd life, and others’ joy and pain,\nAnd love, if love, of happier men.\n\nOf happier men; for they, at least,\nHave _dreamed_ two human hearts might blend\nIn one, and were through faith released\nFrom isolation without end\nProlonged; nor knew, although not less\nAlone than thou, their loneliness.", + "growing-old": { + "title": "“Growing Old”", + "body": "What is it to grow old?\nIs it to lose the glory of the form,\nThe lustre of the eye?\nIs it for beauty to forego her wreath?\n--Yes, but not this alone.\n\nIs it to feel our strength--\nNot our bloom only, but our strength--decay?\nIs it to feel each limb\nGrow stiffer, every function less exact,\nEach nerve more loosely strung?\n\nYes, this, and more; but not,\nAh! ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be.\n’Tis not to have our life\nMellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,--\nA golden day’s decline.\n\n’Tis not to see the world\nAs from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,\nAnd heart profoundly stirred;\nAnd weep, and feel the fulness of the past,\nThe years that are no more.\n\nIt is to spend long days,\nAnd not once feel that we were ever young;\nIt is to add, immured\nIn the hot prison of the present, month\nTo month with weary pain.\n\nIt is to suffer this,\nAnd feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.\nDeep in our hidden heart\nFesters the dull remembrance of a change,\nBut no emotion,--none.\n\nIt is--last stage of all--\nWhen we are frozen up within, and quite\nThe phantom of ourselves,\nTo hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,\nWhich blamed the living man.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" - ], - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } + ] } }, "morality": { @@ -7326,6 +7376,13 @@ "body": "We cannot kindle when we will\nThe fire which in the heart resides;\nThe spirit bloweth and is still,\nIn mystery our soul abides.\nBut tasks in hours of insight willed\nCan be through hours of gloom fulfilled.\n\nWith aching hands and bleeding feet\nWe dig and heap, lay stone on stone;\nWe bear the burden and the heat\nOf the long day, and wish ’twere done.\nNot till the hours of light return,\nAll we have built do we discern.\n\nThen, when the clouds are off the soul,\nWhen thou dost bask in Nature’s eye,\nAsk how _she_ viewed thy self-control,\nThy struggling, tasked morality,--\nNature, whose free, light, cheerful air,\nOft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.\n\nAnd she, whose censure thou dost dread,\nWhose eye thou wast afraid to seek,\nSee, on her face a glow is spread,\nA strong emotion on her cheek!\n“Ah, child!” she cries, “that strife divine,\nWhence was it, for it is not mine?”\n\n“There is no effort on _my_ brow;\nI do not strive, I do not weep:\nI rush with the swift spheres, and glow\nIn joy, and when I will, I sleep.\nYet that severe, that earnest air,\nI saw, I felt it once--but where?”\n\n“I knew not yet the gauge of time,\nNor wore the manacles of space;\nI felt it in some other clime,\nI saw it in some other place.\n’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,\nAnd lay upon the breast of God.”", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] @@ -7336,6 +7393,13 @@ "body": "“Not by the justice that my father spurned,\nNot for the thousands whom my father slew,\nAltars unfed and temples overturned,\nCold hearts and thankless tongues, where thanks are due;\nFell this dread voice from lips that cannot lie,\nStern sentence of the Powers of Destiny.”\n\n“I will unfold my sentence and my crime.\nMy crime,--that, rapt in reverential awe,\nI sat obedient, in the fiery prime\nOf youth, self-governed, at the feet of Law;\nEnnobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,\nBy contemplation of diviner things.”\n\n“My father loved injustice, and lived long;\nCrowned with gray hairs he died, and full of sway.\nI loved the good he scorned, and hated wrong--\nThe gods declare my recompense to-day.\nI looked for life more lasting, rule more high;\nAnd when six years are measured, lo, I die!”\n\n“Yet surely, O my people, did I deem\nMan’s justice from the all-just gods was given;\nA light that from some upper fount did beam,\nSome better archetype, whose seat was heaven;\nA light that, shining from the blest abodes,\nDid shadow somewhat of the life of gods.”\n\n“Mere phantoms of man’s self-tormenting heart,\nWhich on the sweets that woo it dares not feed!\nVain dreams, which quench our pleasures, then depart,\nWhen the duped soul, self-mastered, claims its meed;\nWhen, on the strenuous just man, Heaven bestows,\nCrown of his struggling life, an unjust close!”\n\n“Seems it so light a thing, then, austere powers,\nTo spurn man’s common lure, life’s pleasant things?\nSeems there no joy in dances crowned with flowers,\nLove free to range, and regal banquetings?\nBend ye on these indeed an unmoved eye,\nNot gods, but ghosts, in frozen apathy?”\n\n“Or is it that some force, too stern, too strong,\nEven for yourselves to conquer or beguile,\nBears earth and heaven and men and gods along,\nLike the broad volume of the insurgent Nile?\nAnd the great powers we serve, themselves may be\nSlaves of a tyrannous necessity?”\n\n“Or in mid-heaven, perhaps, your golden cars,\nWhere earthly voice climbs never, wing their flight,\nAnd in wild hunt, through mazy tracts of stars,\nSweep in the sounding stillness of the night?\nOr in deaf ease, on thrones of dazzling sheen,\nDrinking deep draughts of joy, ye dwell serene?”\n\n“Oh, wherefore cheat our youth, if thus it be,\nOf one short joy, one lust, one pleasant dream?\nStringing vain words of powers we cannot see,\nBlind divinations of a will supreme;\nLost labor! when the circumambient gloom\nBut hides, if gods, gods careless of our doom?”\n\n“The rest I give to joy. Even while I speak,\nMy sand runs short; and as yon star-shot ray,\nHemmed by two banks of cloud, peers pale and weak,\nNow, as the barrier closes, dies away,--\nEven so do past and future intertwine,\nBlotting this six years’ space, which yet is mine.”\n\n“Six years,--six little years,--six drops of time!\nYet suns shall rise, and many moons shall wane,\nAnd old men die, and young men pass their prime,\nAnd languid pleasure fade and flower again,\nAnd the dull gods behold, ere these are flown,\nRevels more deep, joy keener than their own.”\n\n“Into the silence of the groves and woods\nI will go forth; though something would I say,--\nSomething,--yet what, I know not: for the gods\nThe doom they pass revoke not nor delay;\nAnd prayers and gifts and tears are fruitless all,\nAnd the night waxes, and the shadows fall.”\n\n“Ye men of Egypt, ye have heard your king!\nI go, and I return not. But the will\nOf the great gods is plain; and ye must bring\nIll deeds, ill passions, zealous to fulfil\nTheir pleasure, to their feet; and reap their praise,--\nThe praise of gods, rich boon! and length of days.”\n\n--So spake he, half in anger, half in scorn;\nAnd one loud cry of grief and of amaze\nBroke from his sorrowing people; so he spake,\nAnd turning, left them there: and with brief pause,\nGirt with a throng of revellers, bent his way\nTo the cool region of the groves he loved.\nThere by the river-banks he wandered on,\nFrom palm-grove on to palm-grove, happy trees,\nTheir smooth tops shining sunward, and beneath\nBurying their unsunned stems in grass and flowers;\nWhere in one dream the feverish time of youth\nMight fade in slumber, and the feet of joy\nMight wander all day long and never tire.\nHere came the king, holding high feast, at morn,\nRose-crowned; and ever, when the sun went down,\nA hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,\nFrom tree to tree all through the twinkling grove,\nRevealing all the tumult of the feast,--\nFlushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine;\nWhile the deep-burnished foliage overhead\nSplintered the silver arrows of the moon.\n\nIt may be that sometimes his wondering soul\nFrom the loud joyful laughter of his lips\nMight shrink half startled, like a guilty man\nWho wrestles with his dream; as some pale shape,\nGliding half hidden through the dusky stems,\nWould thrust a hand before the lifted bowl,\nWhispering, _A little space, and thou art mine!_\nIt may be, on that joyless feast his eye\nDwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within,\nTook measure of his soul, and knew its strength,\nAnd by that silent knowledge, day by day,\nWas calmed, ennobled, comforted, sustained.\nIt may be; but not less his brow was smooth,\nAnd his clear laugh fled ringing through the gloom,\nAnd his mirth quailed not at the mild reproof\nSighed out by winter’s sad tranquillity;\nNor, palled with its own fulness, ebbed and died\nIn the rich languor of long summer-days;\nNor withered when the palm-tree plumes, that roofed\nWith their mild dark his grassy banquet-hall,\nBent to the cold winds of the showerless spring;\nNo, nor grew dark when autumn brought the clouds.\n\nSo six long years he revelled, night and day.\nAnd when the mirth waxed loudest, with dull sound\nSometimes from the grove’s centre echoes came,\nTo tell his wondering people of their king;\nIn the still night, across the steaming flats,\nMixed with the murmur of the moving Nile.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "The Strayed Reveller, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1849" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7349,6 +7413,13 @@ "body": "In summer, on the headlands,\nThe Baltic Sea along,\nSits Neckan with his harp of gold,\nAnd sings his plaintive song.\n\nGreen rolls, beneath the headlands,\nGreen rolls the Baltic Sea;\nAnd there, below the Neckan’s feet,\nHis wife and children be.\n\nHe sings not of the ocean,\nIts shells and roses pale:\nOf earth, of earth, the Neckan sings,\nHe hath no other tale.\n\nHe sits upon the headlands,\nAnd sings a mournful stave\nOf all he saw and felt on earth,\nFar from the kind sea-wave.\n\nSings how, a knight, he wandered\nBy castle, field, and town;\nBut earthly knights have harder hearts\nThan the sea-children own.\n\nSings of his earthly bridal,\nPriest, knights, and ladies gay.\n“And who art thou,” the priest began,\n“Sir Knight, who wedd’st to-day?”\n\n“I am no knight,” he answered;\n“From the sea-waves I come.”\nThe knights drew sword, the ladies screamed,\nThe surpliced priest stood dumb.\n\nHe sings how from the chapel\nHe vanished with his bride,\nAnd bore her down to the sea-halls,\nBeneath the salt sea-tide.\n\nHe sings how she sits weeping\n’Mid shells that round her lie.\n“False Neckan shares my bed,” she weeps;\n“No Christian mate have I.”\n\nHe sings how through the billows\nHe rose to earth again,\nAnd sought a priest to sign the cross,\nThat Neckan heaven might gain.\n\nHe sings how, on an evening,\nBeneath the birch-trees cool,\nHe sate and played his harp of gold,\nBeside the river-pool.\n\nBeside the pool sate Neckan,\nTears filled his mild blue eye.\nOn his white mule, across the bridge,\nA cassocked priest rode by.\n\n“Why sitt’st thou there, O Neckan,\nAnd play’st thy harp of gold?\nSooner shall this my staff bear leaves,\nThan thou shalt heaven behold.”\n\nBut, lo! the staff, it budded;\nIt greened, it branched, it waved.\n“O ruth of God!” the priest cried out,\n“This lost sea-creature saved!”\n\nThe cassocked priest rode onwards,\nAnd vanished with his mule;\nAnd Neckan in the twilight gray\nWept by the river-pool.\n\nHe wept, “The earth hath kindness,\nThe sea, the starry poles;\nEarth, sea, and sky, and God above,--\nBut, ah! not human souls!”\n\nIn summer, on the headlands,\nThe Baltic Sea along,\nSits Neckan with his harp of gold,\nAnd sings this plaintive song.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7362,6 +7433,13 @@ "body": "Hark! ah, the nightingale--\nThe tawny-throated!\nHark! from that moonlit cedar what a burst!\nWhat triumph! hark! what pain!\n\nO wanderer from a Grecian shore,\nStill, after many years, in distant lands,\nStill nourishing in thy bewildered brain\nThat wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain,\nSay, will it never heal?\nAnd can this fragrant lawn\nWith its cool trees, and night,\nAnd the sweet, tranquil Thames,\nAnd moonshine, and the dew,\nTo thy racked heart and brain\nAfford no balm?\n\nDost thou to-night behold,\nHere, through the moonlight on this English grass,\nThe unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?\nDost thou again peruse\nWith hot cheeks and seared eyes\nThe too clear web, and thy dumb sister’s shame?\nDost thou once more assay\nThy flight, and feel come over thee,\nPoor fugitive, the feathery change.\nOnce more, and once more seem to make resound\nWith love and hate, triumph and agony,\nLone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?\nListen, Eugenia,--\nHow thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!\nAgain--thou hearest?\nEternal passion!\nEternal pain!", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7375,6 +7453,13 @@ "body": "The Master stood upon the mount, and taught.\nHe saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes;\n“The old law,” they said, “is wholly come to naught:\nBehold the new world rise!”\n\n“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw\nThe old law observed by scribes and Pharisees?\nI say unto you, see ye keep that law\nMore faithfully than these!”\n\n“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!\nThink not that I to annul the law have willed:\nNo jot, no tittle, from the law shall pass\nTill all have been fulfilled.”\n\nSo Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.\nAnd what, then, shall be said to those to-day,\nWho cry aloud to lay the old world low\nTo clear the new world’s way?\n\n“Religious fervors! ardor misapplied!\nHence, hence!” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind!\nBut keep him self-immersed, pre-occupied,\nAnd lame the active mind.”\n\nAh! from the old world let some one answer give:\n“Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?\nI say unto you, see that _your_ souls live\nA deeper life than theirs!”\n\n“Say ye, ‘The spirit of man has found new roads,\nAnd we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein’?\nLeave, then, the cross as ye have left carved gods,\nBut guard the fire within!”\n\n“Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll,\nAnd no man may the other’s hurt behold;\nYet each will have one anguish,--his own soul\nWhich perishes of cold.”\n\nHere let that voice make end; then let a strain\nFrom a far lonelier distance, like the wind\nBe heard, floating through heaven, and fill again\nThese men’s profoundest mind:--\n\n“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye\nForever doth accompany mankind,\nHath looked on no religion scornfully\nThat men did ever find.”\n\n“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?\nWhich has not fallen on the dry heart like rain?\nWhich has not cried to sunk, self-weary man,--\n_Thou must be born again!_”\n\n“Children of men! not that your age excel\nIn pride of life the ages of your sires,\nBut that _ye_ think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,\nThe Friend of man desires.”", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Empedocles On Etna, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1852" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] @@ -7385,6 +7470,17 @@ "body": "Coldly, sadly descends\nThe autumn evening. The field\nStrewn with its dank yellow drifts\nOf withered leaves, and the elms,\nFade into dimness apace,\nSilent; hardly a shout\nFrom a few boys late at their play!\nThe lights come out in the street,\nIn the schoolroom windows; but cold,\nSolemn, unlighted, austere,\nThrough the gathering darkness, arise\nThe chapel-walls, in whose bound\nThou, my father! art laid.\n\nThere thou dost lie, in the gloom\nOf the autumn evening. But ah!\nThat word _gloom_ to my mind\nBrings thee back in the light\nOf thy radiant vigor again.\nIn the gloom of November we passed\nDays not dark at thy side;\nSeasons impaired not the ray\nOf thy buoyant cheerfulness clear.\nSuch thou wast! and I stand\nIn the autumn evening, and think\nOf bygone autumns with thee.\n\nFifteen years have gone round\nSince thou arosest to tread,\nIn the summer-morning, the road\nOf death, at a call unforeseen,\nSudden. For fifteen years,\nWe who till then in thy shade\nRested as under the boughs\nOf a mighty oak, have endured\nSunshine and rain as we might,\nBare, unshaded, alone,\nLacking the shelter of thee.\n\nO strong soul, by what shore\nTarriest thou now? For that force,\nSurely, has not been left vain!\nSomewhere, surely, afar,\nIn the sounding labor-house vast\nOf being, is practised that strength,\nZealous, beneficent, firm!\n\nYes, in some far-shining sphere,\nConscious or not of the past,\nStill thou performest the word\nOf the Spirit in whom thou dost live,\nPrompt, unwearied, as here.\nStill thou upraisest with zeal\nThe humble good from the ground,\nSternly repressest the bad;\nStill, like a trumpet, dost rouse\nThose who with half-open eyes\nTread the border-land dim\n’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st,\nSuccorest. This was thy work,\nThis was thy life upon earth.\n\nWhat is the course of the life\nOf mortal men on the earth?\nMost men eddy about\nHere and there, eat and drink,\nChatter and love and hate,\nGather and squander, are raised\nAloft, are hurled in the dust,\nStriving blindly, achieving\nNothing; and then they die,--\nPerish; and no one asks\nWho or what they have been,\nMore than he asks what waves,\nIn the moonlit solitudes mild\nOf the midmost ocean, have swelled,\nFoamed for a moment, and gone.\n\nAnd there are some whom a thirst\nArdent, unquenchable, fires,\nNot with the crowd to be spent,\nNot without aim to go round\nIn an eddy of purposeless dust,\nEffort unmeaning and vain.\nAh yes! some of us strive\nNot without action to die\nFruitless, but something to snatch\nFrom dull oblivion, nor all\nGlut the devouring grave.\nWe, we have chosen our path,--\nPath to a clear-purposed goal,\nPath of advance; but it leads\nA long, steep journey, through sunk\nGorges, o’er mountains in snow.\nCheerful, with friends, we set forth:\nThen, on the height, comes the storm.\nThunder crashes from rock\nTo rock; the cataracts reply;\nLightnings dazzle our eyes;\nRoaring torrents have breached\nThe track; the stream-bed descends\nIn the place where the wayfarer once\nPlanted his footstep; the spray\nBoils o’er its borders; aloft,\nThe unseen snow-beds dislodge\nTheir hanging ruin. Alas!\nHavoc is made in our train!\nFriends who set forth at our side\nFalter, are lost in the storm.\n\nWe, we only are left!\nWith frowning foreheads, with lips\nSternly compressed, we strain on,\nOn; and at nightfall at last\nCome to the end of our way,\nTo the lonely inn ’mid the rocks;\nWhere the gaunt and taciturn host\nStands on the threshold, the wind\nShaking his thin white hairs,\nHolds his lantern to scan\nOur storm-beat figures, and asks,--\nWhom in our party we bring?\nWhom we have left in the snow?\n\nSadly we answer, We bring\nOnly ourselves! we lost\nSight of the rest in the storm.\nHardly ourselves we fought through,\nStripped, without friends, as we are.\nFriends, companions, and train,\nThe avalanche swept from our side.\n\nBut thou wouldst not _alone_\nBe saved, my father! _alone_\nConquer and come to thy goal,\nLeaving the rest in the wild.\nWe were weary, and we\nFearful, and we in our march\nFain to drop down and to die.\nStill thou turnedst, and still\nBeckonedst the trembler, and still\nGavest the weary thy hand.\nIf, in the paths of the world,\nStones might have wounded thy feet,\nToil or dejection have tried\nThy spirit, of that we saw\nNothing: to us thou wast still\nCheerful, and helpful, and firm!\nTherefore to thee it was given\nMany to save with thyself;\nAnd, at the end of thy day,\nO faithful shepherd! to come,\nBringing thy sheep in thy hand.\n\nAnd through thee I believe\nIn the noble and great who are gone;\nPure souls honored and blest\nBy former ages, who else else--\nSuch, so soulless, so poor,\nIs the race of men whom I see--\nSeemed but a dream of the heart,\nSeemed but a cry of desire.\nYes! I believe that there lived\nOthers like thee in the past,\nNot like the men of the crowd\nWho all round me to-day\nBluster or cringe, and make life\nHideous and arid and vile;\nBut souls tempered with fire,\nFervent, heroic, and good,\nHelpers and friends of mankind.\n\nServants of God!--or sons\nShall I not call you? because\nNot as servants ye knew\nYour Father’s innermost mind,\nHis who unwillingly sees\nOne of his little ones lost,--\nYours is the praise, if mankind\nHath not as yet in its march\nFainted and fallen and died.\n\nSee! In the rocks of the world\nMarches the host of mankind,\nA feeble, wavering line.\nWhere are they tending? A God\nMarshalled them, gave them their goal.\nAh, but the way is so long!\n\nYears they have been in the wild:\nSore thirst plagues them; the rocks,\nRising all round, overawe;\nFactions divide them; their host\nThreatens to break, to dissolve.\nAh! keep, keep them combined!\nElse, of the myriads who fill\nThat army, not one shall arrive;\nSole they shall stray; on the rocks\nBatter forever in vain,\nDie one by one in the waste.\n\nThen, in such hour of need\nOf your fainting, dispirited race,\nYe like angels appear,\nRadiant with ardor divine.\nBeacons of hope, ye appear!\nLanguor is not in your heart,\nWeakness is not in your word,\nWeariness not on your brow.\nYe alight in our van! at your voice,\nPanic, despair, flee away.\nYe move through the ranks, recall\nThe stragglers, refresh the outworn,\nPraise, re-inspire the brave.\nOrder, courage, return;\nEyes rekindling, and prayers,\nFollow your steps as ye go.\nYe fill up the gaps in our files,\nStrengthen the wavering line,\nStablish, continue our march,\nOn, to the bound of the waste,\nOn, to the City of God.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, + "time": { + "year": "1857", + "month": "november" + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7398,6 +7494,13 @@ "body": "Saint Brandan sails the northern main;\nThe brotherhoods of saints are glad.\nHe greets them once, he sails again;\nSo late! such storms! The saint is mad!\n\nHe heard, across the howling seas,\nChime convent-bells on wintry nights;\nHe saw, on spray-swept Hebrides,\nTwinkle the monastery-lights;\n\nBut north, still north, Saint Brandan steered;\nAnd now no bells, no convents more!\nThe hurtling Polar lights are neared,\nThe sea without a human shore.\n\nAt last (it was the Christmas-night;\nStars shone after a day of storm)\nHe sees float past an iceberg white,\nAnd on it--Christ!--a living form.\n\nThat furtive mien, that scowling eye,\nOf hair that red and tufted fell,\nIt is--oh, where shall Brandan fly?--\nThe traitor Judas, out of hell!\n\nPalsied with terror, Brandan sate;\nThe moon was bright, the iceberg near.\nHe hears a voice sigh humbly, “Wait!\nBy high permission I am here.”\n\n“One moment wait, thou holy man!\nOn earth my crime, my death, they knew;\nMy name is under all men’s ban:\nAh! tell them of my respite too.”\n\n“Tell them, one blessed Christmas-night\n(It was the first after I came,\nBreathing self-murder, frenzy, spite,\nTo rue my guilt in endless flame),--”\n\n“I felt, as I in torment lay\n’Mid the souls plagued by heavenly power,\nAn angel touch mine arm, and say,--\n_Go hence, and cool thyself an hour!_”\n\n“‘Ah! whence this mercy, Lord?’ I said.\n_The leper recollect_, said he,\n_Who asked the passers-by for aid,_\n_In Joppa, and thy charity_.”\n\n“Then I remembered how I went,\nIn Joppa, through the public street,\nOne morn when the sirocco spent\nIts storms of dust with burning heat;”\n\n“And in the street a leper sate,\nShivering with fever, naked, old;\nSand raked his sores from heel to pate,\nThe hot wind fevered him fivefold.”\n\n“He gazed upon me as I passed,\nAnd murmured, _Help me, or I die!_\nTo the poor wretch my cloak I cast,\nSaw him look eased, and hurried by.”\n\n“O Brandan! think what grace divine,\nWhat blessing must full goodness shower,\nWhen fragment of it small, like mine,\nHath such inestimable power!”\n\n“Well-fed, well-clothed, well-friended, I\nDid that chance act of good, that one!\nThen went my way to kill and lie,\nForgot my good as soon as done.”\n\n“That germ of kindness, in the womb\nOf mercy caught, did not expire;\nOutlives my guilt, outlives my doom,\nAnd friends me in the pit of fire.”\n\n“Once every year, when carols wake,\nOn earth, the Christmas-night’s repose,\nArising from the sinner’s lake,\nI journey to these healing snows.”\n\n“I stanch with ice my burning breast,\nWith silence balm my whirling brain.\nO Brandan! to this hour of rest,\nThat Joppan leper’s ease was pain.”\n\nTears started to Saint Brandan’s eyes;\nHe bowed his head, he breathed a prayer,\nThen looked--and lo, the frosty skies!\nThe iceberg, and no Judas there!", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7411,6 +7514,13 @@ "body": "Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;\nGo, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!\nNo longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,\nNor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,\nNor the cropped grasses shoot another head;\nBut when the fields are still,\nAnd the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,\nAnd only the white sheep are sometimes seen\nCross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green,\nCome, shepherd, and again renew the quest!\n\nHere, where the reaper was at work of late,--\nIn this high field’s dark corner, where he leaves\nHis coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,\nAnd in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,\nThen here at noon comes back his stores to use,--\nHere will I sit and wait,\nWhile to my ear from uplands far away\nThe bleating of the folded flocks is borne,\nWith distant cries of reapers in the corn,--\nAll the live murmur of a summer’s day.\n\nScreened is this nook o’er the high, half-reaped field,\nAnd here till sundown, shepherd! will I be.\nThrough the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,\nAnd round green roots and yellowing stalks I see\nPale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep;\nAnd air-swept lindens yield\nTheir scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers\nOf bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,\nAnd bower me from the August-sun with shade;\nAnd the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers.\n\nAnd near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book.\nCome, let me read the oft-read tale again!\nThe story of that Oxford scholar poor,\nOf shining parts and quick inventive brain,\nWho, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,\nOne summer-morn forsook\nHis friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore,\nAnd roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,\nAnd came, as most men deemed, to little good,\nBut came to Oxford and his friends no more.\n\nBut once, years after, in the country-lanes,\nTwo scholars, whom at college erst he knew,\nMet him, and of his way of life inquired;\nWhereat he answered, that the gypsy-crew,\nHis mates, had arts to rule as they desired\nThe workings of men’s brains,\nAnd they can bind them to what thoughts they will.\n“And I,” he said, “the secret of their art,\nWhen fully learned, will to the world impart;\nBut it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill.”\n\nThis said, he left them, and returned no more.\nBut rumors hung about the country-side,\nThat the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,\nSeen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,\nIn hat of antique shape, and cloak of gray,\nThe same the gypsies wore.\nShepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;\nAt some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,\nOn the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors\nHad found him seated at their entering;\n\nBut, ’mid their drink and clatter, he would fly.\nAnd I myself seem half to know thy looks,\nAnd put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace;\nAnd boys who in lone wheat-fields scare the rooks\nI ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;\nOr in my boat I lie\nMoored to the cool bank in the summer-heats,\nMid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,\nAnd watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,\nAnd wonder if thou haunt’st their shy retreats.\n\nFor most, I know, thou lov’st retired ground!\nThee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,\nReturning home on summer-nights, have met\nCrossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,\nTrailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,\nAs the punt’s rope chops round;\nAnd leaning backward in a pensive dream,\nAnd fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers\nPlucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,\nAnd thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.\n\nAnd then they land, and thou art seen no more!\nMaidens, who from the distant hamlets come\nTo dance around the Fyfield elm in May,\nOft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,\nOr cross a stile into the public way;\nOft thou hast given them store\nOf flowers,--the frail-leafed, white anemone,\nDark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,\nAnd purple orchises with spotted leaves,--\nBut none hath words she can report of thee!\n\nAnd, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time’s here\nIn June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,\nMen who through those wide fields of breezy grass,\nWhere black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames,\nTo bathe in the abandoned lasher pass,\nHave often passed thee near\nSitting upon the river-bank o’ergrown;\nMarked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,\nThy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air:\nBut, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!\n\nAt some lone homestead in the Cumner hills,\nWhere at her open door the housewife darns,\nThou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate\nTo watch the threshers in the mossy barns.\nChildren, who early range these slopes and late\nFor cresses from the rills,\nHave known thee eying, all an April-day,\nThe springing pastures and the feeding kine;\nAnd marked thee, when the stars come out and shine,\nThrough the long dewy grass move slow away.\n\nIn autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,--\nWhere most the gypsies by the turf-edged way\nPitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see\nWith scarlet patches tagged and shreds of gray,\nAbove the forest ground called Thessaly,--\nThe blackbird picking food\nSees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;\nSo often has he known thee past him stray,\nRapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray,\nAnd waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.\n\nAnd once, in winter, on the causeway chill\nWhere home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,\nHave I not passed thee on the wooden bridge\nWrapped in thy cloak and battling with the snow,\nThy face toward Hinksey and its wintry ridge?\nAnd thou hast climbed the hill,\nAnd gained the white brow of the Cumner range;\nTurned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,\nThe line of festal light in Christ-church hall:\nThen sought thy straw in some sequestered grange.\n\nBut what--I dream! Two hundred years are flown\nSince first thy story ran through Oxford halls,\nAnd the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe\nThat thou wert wandered from the studious walls\nTo learn strange arts, and join a gypsy-tribe.\nAnd thou from earth art gone\nLong since, and in some quiet churchyard laid,--\nSome country-nook, where o’er thy unknown grave\nTall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,\nUnder a dark, red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.\n\n--No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!\nFor what wears out the life of mortal men?\n’Tis that from change to change their being rolls;\n’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,\nExhaust the energy of strongest souls,\nAnd numb the elastic powers,\nTill having used our nerves with bliss and teen,\nAnd tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,\nTo the just-pausing Genius we remit\nOur well-worn life, and are--what we have been.\n\nThou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so?\nThou hadst _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire;\nElse wert thou long since numbered with thedead!\nElse hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!\nThe generations of thy peers are fled,\nAnd we ourselves shall go;\nBut thou possessest an immortal lot,\nAnd we imagine thee exempt from age,\nAnd living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,\nBecause thou hadst--what we, alas! have not.\n\nFor early didst thou leave the world, with powers\nFresh, undiverted to the world without,\nFirm to their mark, not spent on other things;\nFree from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,\nWhich much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.\nO life unlike to ours!\nWho fluctuate idly without term or scope,\nOf whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,\nAnd each half lives a hundred different lives;\nWho wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.\n\nThou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,\nLight half-believers of our casual creeds,\nWho never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,\nWhose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,\nWhose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;\nFor whom each year we see\nBreeds new beginnings, disappointments new;\nWho hesitate and falter life away,\nAnd lose to-morrow the ground won to-day--\nAh! do not we, wanderer! await it too?\n\nYes, we await it! but it still delays,\nAnd then we suffer! and amongst us one,\nWho most has suffered, takes dejectedly\nHis seat upon the intellectual throne;\nAnd all his store of sad experience he\nLays bare of wretched days;\nTells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,\nAnd how the dying spark of hope was fed,\nAnd how the breast was soothed, and how the head,\nAnd all his hourly varied anodynes.\n\nThis for our wisest! and we others pine,\nAnd wish the long unhappy dream would end,\nAnd waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;\nWith close-lipped patience for our only friend,--\nSad patience, too near neighbor to despair,--\nBut none has hope like thine!\nThou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,\nRoaming the country-side, a truant boy,\nNursing thy project in unclouded joy,\nAnd every doubt long blown by time away.\n\nOh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,\nAnd life ran gayly as the sparkling Thames;\nBefore this strange disease of modern life,\nWith its sick hurry, its divided aims,\nIts heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife,--\nFly hence, our contact fear!\nStill fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!\nAverse, as Dido did with gesture stern\nFrom her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,\nWave us away, and keep thy solitude!\n\nStill nursing the unconquerable hope,\nStill clutching the inviolable shade,\nWith a free, onward impulse brushing through,\nBy night, the silvered branches of the glade,--\nFar on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,\nOn some mild pastoral slope\nEmerge, and resting on the moonlit pales\nFreshen thy flowers as in former years\nWith dew, or listen with enchanted ears,\nFrom the dark dingles, to the nightingales!\n\nBut fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!\nFor strong the infection of our mental strife,\nWhich, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;\nAnd we should win thee from thy own fair life,\nLike us distracted, and like us unblest.\nSoon, soon thy cheer would die,\nThy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers,\nAnd thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;\nAnd then thy glad perennial youth would fade,\nFade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.\n\nThen fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!\n--As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,\nDescried at sunrise an emerging prow\nLifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,\nThe fringes of a southward-facing brow\nAmong the Aegeaen isles;\nAnd saw the merry Grecian coaster come,\nFreighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,\nGreen bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine,\nAnd knew the intruders on his ancient home,--\n\nThe young light-hearted masters of the waves,--\nAnd snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail,\nAnd day and night held on indignantly\nO’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,\nBetwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,\nTo where the Atlantic raves\nOutside the western straits, and unbent sails\nThere where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,\nShy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;\nAnd on the beach undid his corded bales.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7424,16 +7534,50 @@ "body": "Weary of myself, and sick of asking\nWhat I am, and what I ought to be,\nAt this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me\nForwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.\n\nAnd a look of passionate desire\nO’er the sea and to the stars I send:\n“Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me,\nCalm me, ah, compose me to the end!\n\nAh, once more,” I cried, “ye stars, ye waters,\nOn my heart your mighty charm renew;\nStill, still let me, as I gaze upon you,\nFeel my soul becoming vast like you!”\n\nFrom the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,\nOver the lit sea’s unquiet way,\nIn the rustling night-air came the answer,--\n“Wouldst thou _be_ as these are? _Live_ as they.”\n\n“Unaffrighted by the silence round them,\nUndistracted by the sights they see,\nThese demand not that the things without them\nYield them love, amusement, sympathy.”\n\n“And with joy the stars perform their shining,\nAnd the sea its long moon-silvered roll;\nFor self-poised they live, nor pine with noting\nAll the fever of some differing soul.”\n\n“Bounded by themselves, and unregardful\nIn what state God’s other works may be,\nIn their own tasks all their powers pouring,\nThese attain the mighty life you see.”\n\nO air-born voice! long since, severely clear,\nA cry like thine in mine own heart I hear,--\n“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he\nWho finds himself loses his misery!”", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1853" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] } }, - "summer-night": { - "title": "“Summer Night”", + "a-summer-night": { + "title": "“A Summer Night”", "body": "In the deserted, moon-blanched street,\nHow lonely rings the echo of my feet!\nThose windows, which I gaze at, frown,\nSilent and white, unopening down,\nRepellent as the world; but see,\nA break between the housetops shows\nThe moon! and lost behind her, fading dim\nInto the dewy dark obscurity\nDown at the far horizon’s rim,\nDoth a whole tract of heaven disclose!\n\nAnd to my mind the thought\nIs on a sudden brought\nOf a past night, and a far different scene.\nHeadlands stood out into the moonlit deep\nAs clearly as at noon;\nThe spring-tide’s brimming flow\nHeaved dazzlingly between;\nHouses, with long white sweep,\nGirdled the glistening bay;\nBehind, through the soft air,\nThe blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.\nThat night was far more fair--\nBut the same restless pacings to and fro,\nAnd the same vainly throbbing heart was there,\nAnd the same bright, calm moon.\n\nAnd the calm moonlight seems to say,--\n_Hast thou, then, still the old unquiet breast,\nWhich neither deadens into rest,\nNor ever feels the fiery glow\nThat whirls the spirit from itself away,\nBut fluctuates to and fro,\nNever by passion quite possessed,\nAnd never quite benumbed by the world’s sway?_\nAnd I, I know not if to pray\nStill to be what I am, or yield, and be\nLike all the other men I see.\n\nFor most men in a brazen prison live,\nWhere, in the sun’s hot eye,\nWith heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly\nTheir lives to some unmeaning task-work give,\nDreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.\nAnd as, year after year,\nFresh products of their barren labor fall\nFrom their tired hands, and rest\nNever yet comes more near,\nGloom settles slowly down over their breast.\nAnd while they try to stem\nThe waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,\nDeath in their prison reaches them,\nUnfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.\n\nAnd the rest, a few,\nEscape their prison, and depart\nOn the wide ocean of life anew.\nThere the freed prisoner, where’er his heart\nListeth, will sail;\nNor doth he know how there prevail,\nDespotic on that sea,\nTrade-winds which cross it from eternity.\nAwhile he holds some false way, undebarred\nBy thwarting signs, and braves\nThe freshening wind and blackening waves.\nAnd then the tempest strikes him; and between\nThe lightning-bursts is seen\nOnly a driving wreck,\nAnd the pale master on his spar-strewn deck\nWith anguished face and flying hair,\nGrasping the rudder hard,\nStill bent to make some port, he knows not where,\nStill standing for some false, impossible shore.\nAnd sterner comes the roar\nOf sea and wind; and through the deepening gloom\nFainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,\nAnd he too disappears, and comes no more.\n\nIs there no life, but these alone?\nMadman or slave, must man be one?\n\nPlainness and clearness without shadow of stain!\nClearness divine!\nYe heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign\nOf languor, though so calm, and though so great\nAre yet untroubled and unpassionate;\nWho, though so noble, share in the world’s toil,\nAnd, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!\nI will not say that your mild deeps retain\nA tinge, it may be, of their silent pain\nWho have longed deeply once, and longed in vain;\nBut I will rather say that you remain\nA world above man’s head, to let him see\nHow boundless might his soul’s horizons be,\nHow vast, yet of what clear transparency!\nHow it were good to live there, and breathe free;\nHow fair a lot to fill\nIs left to each man still!", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Empedocles On Etna, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1852" + } + }, + "tags": [ + "English" + ], + "context": { + "season": "summer" + } + } + }, + "to-marguerite": { + "title": "“To Marguerite”", + "body": "We were apart: yet, day by day,\nI bade my heart more constant be.\nI bade it keep the world away,\nAnd grow a home for only thee;\nNor feared but thy love likewise grew,\nLike mine, each day, more tried, more true.\n\nThe fault was grave! I might have known,\nWhat far too soon, alas! I learned,--\nThe heart can bind itself alone,\nAnd faith may oft be unreturned.\nSelf-swayed our feelings ebb and swell.\nThou lov’st no more. Farewell! Farewell!\n\nFarewell!--And thou, thou lonely heart,\nWhich never yet without remorse\nEven for a moment didst depart\nFrom thy remote and spherèd course\nTo haunt the place where passions reign,--\nBack to thy solitude again!\n\nBack! with the conscious thrill of shame\nWhich Luna felt, that summer-night,\nFlash through her pure immortal frame,\nWhen she forsook the starry height\nTo hang o’er Endymion’s sleep\nUpon the pine-grown Latmian steep.\n\nYet she, chaste queen, had never proved\nHow vain a thing is mortal love,\nWandering in heaven, far removed;\nBut thou hast long had place to prove\nThis truth,--to prove, and make thine own:\n“Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”\n\nOr, if not quite alone, yet they\nWhich touch thee are unmating things,--\nOcean and clouds and night and day;\nLorn autumns and triumphant springs;\nAnd life, and others’ joy and pain,\nAnd love, if love, of happier men.\n\nOf happier men; for they, at least,\nHave _dreamed_ two human hearts might blend\nIn one, and were through faith released\nFrom isolation without end\nProlonged; nor knew, although not less\nAlone than thou, their loneliness.", + "metadata": { + "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "Empedocles On Etna, And Other Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1852" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ], @@ -7447,6 +7591,13 @@ "body": "_Even in a palace, life may be led well!_\nSo spake the imperial sage, purest of men,\nMarcus Aurelius. But the stifling den\nOf common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,\n\nOur freedom for a little bread we sell,\nAnd drudge under some foolish master’s ken\nWho rates us if we peer outside our pen,--\nMatched with a palace, is not this a hell?\n\n_Even in a palace!_ On his truth sincere,\nWho spoke these words, no shadow ever came;\nAnd when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame\n\nSome nobler, ampler stage of life to win,\nI’ll stop, and say, “There were no succor here!\nThe aids to noble life are all within.”", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] @@ -7457,6 +7608,13 @@ "body": "’Tis death! and peace indeed is here,\nAnd ease from shame, and rest from fear.\nThere’s nothing can dismarble now\nThe smoothness of that limpid brow.\nBut is a calm like this, in truth,\nThe crowning end of life and youth?\nAnd when this boon rewards the dead,\nAre all debts paid, has all been said?\nAnd is the heart of youth so light,\nIts step so firm, its eye so bright,\nBecause on its hot brow there blows\nA wind of promise and repose\nFrom the far grave, to which it goes;\nBecause it has the hope to come,\nOne day, to harbor in the tomb?\nAh, no! the bliss youth dreams is one\nFor daylight, for the cheerful sun,\nFor feeling nerves and living breath;\nYouth dreams a bliss on this side death.\nIt dreams a rest, if not more deep,\nMore grateful than this marble sleep;\nIt hears a voice within it tell,--\n_Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well._\n’Tis all, perhaps, which man acquires,\nBut ’tis not what our youth desires.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "New Poems", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1867" + } + }, "tags": [ "English" ] @@ -8763,7 +8921,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Christ Church", + "college": "Christ Church", "level": "masters" } ], @@ -9731,7 +9889,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -11244,7 +11402,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Balliol College", + "college": "Balliol College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -13556,7 +13714,7 @@ }, "dream-song-28": { "title": "“Dream Song 28”", - "body": "It was wet & white & swift and where I am\nwe don’t know. It was dark and then\nit isn’t.\nI wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat\nnothing. I am usually tired.\nI’m alone too.\n\nIf only the strange one with so few legs would come,\nI’d say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.\nWhere are his note I loved?\nThere may be horribles; it’s hard to tell.\nThe barker nips me but somehow I feel\nhe too is on my side.\n\nI’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all\nrun, even that would be better. I am hungry.\nThe sun is not hot.\nIt’s not a good position I am in.\nIf I had to do the whole thing over again\nI wouldn’t.", + "body": "_Snow Line_\n\nIt was wet & white & swift and where I am\nwe don’t know. It was dark and then\nit isn’t.\nI wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat\nnothing. I am usually tired.\nI’m alone too.\n\nIf only the strange one with so few legs would come,\nI’d say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.\nWhere are his note I loved?\nThere may be horribles; it’s hard to tell.\nThe barker nips me but somehow I feel\nhe too is on my side.\n\nI’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all\nrun, even that would be better. I am hungry.\nThe sun is not hot.\nIt’s not a good position I am in.\nIf I had to do the whole thing over again\nI wouldn’t.", "metadata": { "language": "English", "source": { @@ -13568,7 +13726,10 @@ }, "tags": [ "American" - ] + ], + "context": { + "season": "winter" + } } }, "dream-song-29": { @@ -15899,7 +16060,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -16276,6 +16437,15 @@ "body": "Alone on the railroad track\n I walked with pounding heart.\nThe ties were too close together\n or maybe too far apart.\n\nThe scenery was impoverished:\n scrub-pine and oak; beyond\nits mingled gray-green foliage\n I saw the little pond\n\nwhere the dirty old hermit lives,\n lie like an old tear\nholding onto its injuries\n lucidly year after year.\n\nThe hermit shot off his shot-gun\n and the tree by his cabin shook.\nOver the pond went a ripple\n The pet hen went chook-chook.\n\n“Love should be put into action!”\n screamed the old hermit.\nAcross the pond an echo\n tried and tried to confirm it.", "metadata": { "language": "English", + "source": { + "title": "The New Yorker", + "type": "magazine", + "published": { + "year": "1946", + "month": "april", + "day": 13 + } + }, "tags": [ "American" ] @@ -20472,7 +20642,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Corpus Christi College", + "college": "Corpus Christi College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" }, @@ -22361,7 +22531,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "King’s College", + "college": "King’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -24490,7 +24660,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -25740,23 +25910,6 @@ ] } }, - "the-rejoneador": { - "title": "“The Rejoneador”", - "body": "While in your lightly veering course\nA seraph seems to take his flight,\nThe swervings of your snowy horse,\nVolted with valour and delight,\nIn thundering orbit wheel the Ring\nWhich Apis pivots with his pain\nAnd of whose realm, with royal stain,\nHis agony anoints you king.\nHis horns the moon, his hue the night,\nThe dying embers of his sight\nAcross their bloody film may view\nThe star of morning rise in fire,\nProjectile of the same desire\nWhose pride is animate in you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "English", - "source": { - "title": "Flowering Reeds", - "type": "book", - "published": { - "year": "1933" - } - }, - "tags": [ - "South African" - ] - } - }, "resurrection": { "title": "“Resurrection”", "body": "The sun leaves rosy with his breath\nA heaven rinsed with silver rains,\nAnd on the golden verge of death\nThe lingering storm in glory gains:\n\nWhile the red light and rolling thunder\nUnvanquished from their fight withdraw:\nDim to the eyes’ yet vibrant wonder\nWhom such a vision held in awe,\n\nExhaling in the mists of gold\nFrom every pollen-wreathed husk,\nHis triumphs in the stars foretold,\nA shade emerges in the dusk,\n\nA wrestler such as Jacob knew\nWhose strength increases with the hours,\nA Hercules of matchless thew\nWhose body is the breath of flowers--\n\nSo evening with a god grew full\nWhen Jove, amid such blossomed thorns,\nRaised, in the lily-breathing Bull,\nThe silver moonrise of his horns.\n\nAntaeus of the fallen storms,\nThe resurrection of the power\nWhose splendours in the frailest forms\nThe most unconquerably tower,\n\nThe Form whose challenge, high and loud,\nThe whistling fifes of wind had spun,\nWhose rolling muscles to a proud\nRepulse had dared the noonday sun,\n\nWhose heavy torrent-hurling shock\nHad filled the roaring gullies, bowed\nThe groaning tree, and split the rock--\nHad worn no armour but a cloud,\n\nAnd now from the wet earth reborn,\nAll Africa his phoenix pyre,\nOut of a thousand leagues of thorn\nHad softly smouldered into fire.\n\nThe lightning sinews of his limbs\nAre in that soft effulgence furled\nAnd on the breath of incense swims\nThe thunderbolt his anger hurled.\n\nDiffusing on through endless space,\nMajestic peace without a flaw,\nWild is the light that from his face\nThe woods and dreaming waters draw.\n\nThe skies are with his trophies hung--\nThe Bull, the Lion, and the Bear;\nWhat spoil of victories unsung\nRemains to be erected there?\n\nThe gorgeous Ram that horns his lyre\nOf silence: whose great pelt is rolled\nTo quilt a thousand hills with fire\nIn the acacia’s fleece of gold--\n\nRound which, astream through flowering vales,\nDread guardians, pythoning the spoils,\nLit by the moon with glittering scales\nThe great Zambezis wreathe their coils--\n\nShorn from the shoulders of the morning\nBy his strong arm of thunder, yields\nIts shaggy hide, his thews adorning\nIn all the fragrance of the fields.\n\nYet through the wreaths of cloudy fire\nThat crown the hazard of his quest,\nStill to new victories aspire\nThe broodings of his dark unrest.\n\nAnd his long gaze, down some immense\nHorizon of horizons drawn,\nYearns to the fleeced magnificence\nAnd fire of its perennial dawn.\n\nShort is the peace, though hushed and breathless,\nIn which we feel the victor’s will\nAnd its intrinsic hydra, deathless,\nReviving at the self-same rill.", @@ -26611,7 +26764,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Merton College", + "college": "Merton College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -26748,7 +26901,8 @@ "Canadian" ], "context": { - "month": "june" + "month": "june", + "month_epoch": "early" } } }, @@ -26832,7 +26986,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Christ Church", + "college": "Christ Church", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -31956,7 +32110,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Jesus College", + "college": "Jesus College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -32631,7 +32785,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Pembroke College", + "college": "Pembroke College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -34520,7 +34674,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "St Catharine’s College", + "college": "St Catharine’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -34730,7 +34884,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Wadham College", + "college": "Wadham College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -36377,7 +36531,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "The Queen’s College", + "college": "The Queen’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -36554,7 +36708,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "level": "bachelors" } ], @@ -39153,7 +39307,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Merton College", + "college": "Merton College", "level": "attended" } ], @@ -41408,7 +41562,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "University College", + "college": "University College", "level": "bachelors", "graduated": 1836 } @@ -43671,8 +43825,8 @@ ] } }, - "brown's-descent-or-the-willy-nilly-slide": { - "title": "“Brown's Descent, or the Willy-nilly Slide”", + "browns-descent-or-the-willy-nilly-slide": { + "title": "“Brown’s Descent, or the Willy-nilly Slide”", "body": "Brown lived at such a lofty farm\nThat everyone for miles could see\nHis lantern when he did his chores\nIn winter after half-past three.\n\nAnd many must have seen him make\nHis wild descent from there one night\n’Cross lots ’cross walls ’cross everything\nDescribing rings of lantern light.\n\nBetween the house and barn the gale\nGot him by something he had on\nAnd blew him out on the icy crust\nThat cased the world and he was gone!\n\nWalls were all buried trees were few:\nHe saw no stay unless he stove\nA hole in somewhere with his heel.\nBut though repeatedly he strove\n\nAnd stamped and said things to himself\nAnd sometimes something seemed to yield\nHe gained no foothold but pursued\nHis journey down from field to field.\n\nSometimes he came with arms outspread\nLike wings revolving in the scene\nUpon his longer axis and\nWith no small dignity of mien.\n\nFaster or slower as he chanced\nSitting or standing as he chose\nAccording as he feared to risk\nHis neck or thought to spare his clothes\n\nHe never let the lantern drop.\nAnd some exclaimed who saw afar\nThe figures he described with it\n“I wonder what those signals are\n\nBrown makes at such an hour of night!\nHe’s celebrating something strange.\nI wonder if he’s sold his farm\nOr been made Master of the Grange.”\n\nHe reeled he lurched he bobbed he checked;\nHe fell and made the lantern rattle\n(But saved the light from going out).\nSo half-way down he fought the battle\n\nIncredulous of his own bad luck.\nAnd then becoming reconciled\nTo everything he gave it up\nAnd came down like a coasting child.\n\n“Well--I--be----” that was all he said\nAs standing in the river road\nHe looked back up the slippery slope\n(Two miles it was) to his abode.\n\nSometimes as an authority\nOn motor-cars I’m asked if I\nShould say our stock was petered out\nAnd this is my sincere reply:\n\nYankees are what they always were.\nDon’t think Brown ever gave up hope\nOf getting home again because\nHe couldn’t climb that slippery slope;\n\nOr even thought of standing there\nUntil the January thaw\nShould take the polish off the crust.\nHe bowed with grace to natural law\n\nAnd then went round it on his feet\nAfter the manner of our stock;\nNot much concerned for those to whom\nAt that particular time o’clock\n\nIt must have looked as if the course\nHe steered was really straight away\nFrom that which he was headed for--\nNot much concerned for them I say.\n\nBut now he snapped his eyes three times;\nThen shook his lantern saying “Ile’s\n’Bout out!” and took the long way home\nBy road a matter of several miles.", "metadata": { "language": "English", @@ -46185,6 +46339,287 @@ } } }, + "stefan-george": { + "metadata": { + "key": "stefan-george", + "name": "Stefan George", + "birth": { + "time": { + "year": "1868", + "month": "july", + "day": 12 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Büdesheim", + "second": "Grand Duchy of Hesse", + "country": "German Empire" + } + }, + "death": { + "time": { + "year": "1933", + "month": "december", + "day": 4 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Minusio", + "second": "Ticino", + "country": "Switzerland" + } + }, + "gender": "male", + "nationalities": [ + "germany" + ], + "languages": [ + "German" + ], + "movements": [ + "Symbolism" + ], + "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_George", + "favorite": true, + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + }, + "poems": { + "address": { + "title": "“Address”", + "body": "I never shall rejoice in cold esteem,\nWhen you deny your flesh with regal pride\nTo common wenches and their brazen dream.\nYou held aloof from them and yet you sighed.\n\nYour hands, indeed, must all in vain be wrung\nFor draught of solace from a higher sphere,\nOh, would that from a mother I were sprung\nSo I myself could bring it to you here!\n\nWhether you begged or bade imperiously,\nNo double red would pour into my face.\nI should surround you with a silken sea,\nOn sumptuous purple yield to your embrace.\n\nBut I can only soothe with phantom kiss,\nA child of buoyant cloud and crystal air,\nI cleave through chaos, sing your state of bliss,\nAnd bear as I divine you also be", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "Odes", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1890" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "after-the-harvest": { + "title": "“After the Harvest”", + "body": "Come to the park they say is dead, and you\nWill see the glint of smiling shores beyond,\nPure clouds with rifts of unexpected blue\nDiffuse a light on patterned path and pond.\n\nTake the grey tinge of boxwood and the charm\nOf burning-yellow birch. The wind is warm.\nLate roses still have traces of their hue,\nSo kiss, and gather them, and wreathe them too.\n\nDo not forget the asters--last of all--\nAnd not the scarlet on the twists of vine,\nAnd what is left of living green, combine\nTo shape a weightless image of the fall.\n\nO urges from the years of youth which sweep\nMe on in quest of her beneath these boughs,\nBefore you I must bend denying brows,\nIn lands of light my love is chained in sleep.\n\nBut if you sent her back, who in the flame\nOf summer and the whir of Cupids would\nHave shyly borne me company, I should\nAcknowledge her this time with glad acclaim.\n\nIn wooden vats the ripened grapes ferment,\nBut I shall heap before her lavishly\nWhat precious shoots and seeds are left to me\nOf all the lovely yield the season lent.\n\nOh, hail and thanks to you who eased my stress,\nWho lulled the constant clamour in my veins\nWith the expectance, dear, of your caress,\nIn weeks the glow of dying summer stains.\n\nYou came, and closer each to each we clung,\nI shall devise a gentle word for you,\nAnd praise you on our sunny paths as though\nYou were the very one for whom I long.\n\nUp to the gate and back again we wander\nBetween the beeches with their gold and gloom,\nAnd glancing through the bars, we pause to ponder\nThe almond tree beyond, in second bloom.\n\nWe search for benches where there is no shade\nAnd alien voices never fret. In dreams\nYour arm in mine and mine in yours is laid,\nAnd we are bathed in long and mellow beams,\n\nAnd feel beholden when the sunflakes glisten\nAround us from the leaves alive with sound,\nAnd only lift our heads to look and listen\nWhen fruit, too rich with ripeness, taps the ground.\n\nAround the pond where runnels bring\nTheir silent waters, let us stroll,\nYou calmly try to plumb my soul,\nA wind ensnares us, soft as spring.\n\nThe leaves that yellow on the mould,\nDiffuse an odour new and frail,\nEchoing me, you subtly told\nWhat pleased me in this picture-tale.\n\nBut do you know of wordless sighs\nAnd bliss on a sublimer stage?\nDown from the bridge, with shaded eyes\nYou watch the swans in slow cortege.\n\nBeside the long and even hedge we lean.\nLed by a Sister, rows of children pace,\nTheir voices rise in praise of heaven’s grace\nIn earthly accents, steadfast and serene.\n\nWe, who are bathed in evening’s latest rays,\nAre frightened by your words, for you recall\nThat we were happy only when a wall\nLike this was still enough to block our gaze.\n\nAbove the spring, niched in the wall, you bent\nTo cup the cool and dabble in the spray,\nAnd yet it seems your fingers draw away\nFrom the two lion heads with some constraint.\n\nYou wear a ring whose jewelled lustre dies.\nI try to slip it off, but you invade\nMy very spirit with your misty eyes\nIn answer to the plea I could not hide.\n\nNow do not lag in reaching for the boon\nOf parting pomp before the turn of tide,\nThe clouds are grey, they swiftly mass and glide,\nPerhaps the fog will be upon us soon.\n\nA faint and fluted note from tattered tree\nTells you that goodness, wise and ultimate,\nWill dip the land--before it learns the fate\nOf freezing storms--in damask lambency.\n\nThe wasps with scales of golden-green are gone\nFrom blooms that close their chalices. We row\nOur boat around an archipelago\nOf matted leaves in shades of bronze and fawn.\n\nToday let us avoid the garden, for\nAs sometimes--unexplained and sudden--this\nElusive scent and lilting breath once more\nImbues us with a long forgotten bliss,\n\nSo that confronts us with reminding ghosts,\nAnd grief that makes us tired and afraid.\nHere from the window you can see how hosts\nOf wind attacked the tree, how much is dead!\n\nAnd from the gate whose iron lilies rust,\nBirds light on lawns asleep in leafen stoles,\nAnd others on the posts, in bitter frost,\nAre sipping rain from empty flower-bowls.\n\nI wrote it down: No more can I conceal\nWhat, as a thought, no longer I can shun,\nWhat I restrain, what you will never feel:\nOur pilgrimage to joy is far from done!\n\nAnd you, beside a tall and withered stalk,\nUnfold my note. I stand apart and guess …\nThe sheet, which slipped from you, was white as chalk,\nThe loudest colour in the sallow grass.\n\nHere in the spacious square of yellow stone\nWith fountains in the middle, though the day\nIs gone, you still would like to talk and stay,\nFor brighter stars, you think, have never shone.\n\nBut keep from the basaltine bowl, it calls\nFor sepulture of faded bough and blade,\nThe wind is cooler where the moonlight falls\nThan over there, where spruces throw their shade.\n\nTo spare you, I have let you guess askew\nThe reason why my sorrow is so deep.\nI feel, when time has parted me from you,\nYou will not even haunt me in my sleep.\n\nBut when the snow has made the park a tomb,\nFaint comfort, I believe, may still be told\nBy lovely residues: a note, a bloom,\nIn wintry silence, fathomless and cold.", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Year of the Soul", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1897" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ], + "context": { + "liturgy": "advent" + } + } + }, + "the-disciple": { + "title": "“The Disciple”", + "body": "You speak of raptures I shall never treasure,\nI pulse with love that binds me to my lord,\nI thirst for glory while you covet pleasure,\nI live for glories of my lord.\n\nMore than in any work of your pursuing\nI am adroit in labours of my lord,\nMy lord is gracious, valid is my doing,\nI only serve my gracious lord.\n\nI know that many died who dared the journey\nInto the land of darkness, but my lord\nIs wise, with him I go to any tourney,\nI trust the wisdom of my lord.\n\nAnd if he gave me no reward, my guerdon\nIs in a glance accorded by my lord,\nThere may be richer, but my lord is sovereign,\nI shall not leave my sovereign lord.", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Tapestry of Life", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1900" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "the-end-of-the-victor": { + "title": "“The End of the Victor”", + "body": "When he had defeated the dragons in poisonous marshes,\nAnd giants who threatened the highways, when he, whom the people\nRevered, had resisted the locks of the women he captured,\nHe battled on nebulous peaks with the wing-bearing serpent\nWhose challenge and mockery struck his companions with terror.\nThey warned him in vain, and the fight was so long that his powers\nForsook him. The monster escaped, its perilous pinion\nInflicted a blow, and the wound would never heal over.\nThe light in his eyes flickered out, no venture could rouse him.\nHe clung to the narrow retreat of his home where he suffered\nHis anguish alone, and kept himself carefully hidden\nFrom carrying mothers, who daydream of beautiful children,\nFrom heroes-to-be whom the gods lend their favour and friendshi", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Book of Eclogues and Eulogies", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1894" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "the-field-gods-sorrow": { + "title": "“The Field-God’s Sorrow”", + "body": "Why should the girls who came from under elm trees\nWith garlands in their hands and on their foreheads,\nOppress my thoughts and grieve me? At the edge\nOf thinning woods, beside my quiet house,\nI watched the meadows, green and splashed with colour,\nClimb upward in a gentle slope, and hawthorn\nScatter the earth with overflow of bloom,\nWhen flitting by the wayside they discerned me,\nBegan to whisper secrets and with laughter\nAnd haste avoided me, although I called them,\nAlthough my pipe implored with tender music.\nAnd not until I drank and caught my image\nDown in the shallow well: my matted locks\nAnd furrowed brow, did I discover what\nTheir flying words had shrilled to one another,\nWhat rang and echoed from the rocky wall.\nNow I have lost what zest I had in poising\nMy fishing-rod above the pond, and coaxing\nMy willow-pipe--that proved so ineffective--\nWith agile touch. But through the misty greyness\nOf dusk I shall beset the Lord of Harvests\nWith the lament that he denied me beauty\nWhen he invested me with deathlessne", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Book of Eclogues and Eulogies", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1894" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "knights-errant": { + "title": "“Knights-Errant”", + "body": "By evil glances they are harried,\nMaligning throngs beset their way,\nSome say an eagle came and carried\nThem after birth, from worlds of fay.\n\nThey pass their years in quests, as though\nFrom land to land they hoped to see\nThe country tilled with golden ploughs,\nThe home of their felicity.\n\nThey head for bouts of strength and leave\nTheir blood on coasts of ashen shale,\nTheir dexter hand they gladly give\nTo shield a woman, proud and pale.\n\nIn times of bitter need they save,\nWhen angels come with darts of bane\nTo drive the guilty to the grave--\nThey suffer for another’s gain.\n\nWhen gusts of praise like incense leap,\nAnd crowds exalt them with their psalms,\nHosannas and the palms which heap\nThe road, are false and passing balms.\n\nBut late, one evening, they draw near\nThe castle where the worn are blessed\nWith holy light, with tranquil cheer\nThat pledges them eternal rest.\n\nTo songs they turn their earthly marches,\nIn waves of festal sound they share\nTransfiguration under arches\nImperishably new and fair.", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Book of Legends and Lays", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1894" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "lambs": { + "title": "“Lambs”", + "body": "When days are done with memory-laden shadows\nIn half-forgotten beauty’s faded frame,\nWaves of white lambs draw slowly through the meadows\nFrom the broad clearing to the darkened stream.\n\nLambs of the mournful moon, the lusty sun,\nYou hardly guess or covet unknown treasures,\nLambs that are shallow and a little vain,\nProud of the golden bells which grace your wethers.\n\nOld in our eyes, you think that youth will keep!\nLambs of a happiness which now seems hollow,\nLambs that sedately tread or lightly leap\nWith feelings which we now can scarcely follow.\n\nYou probe, but from a ledge you never shied!\nLambs of the carefully encircled meres,\nLambs of a faithfulness too old, but tried,\nLambs of beyonds that hold no fears.", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Tapestry of Life", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1900" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "the-recluse-goes-forth": { + "title": "“The Recluse Goes Forth”", + "body": "A lance of light does not deceive him now.\nThe winds that with a scourge of twisted hail\nHad driven him away from every trail,\nAre curved caressingly about his brow.\n\n“O cell, from you I often seek release,\nYour wall has never yielded me rewards\nLike glints of red and blue on snowy swards.\nHow slumber numbs my senses in your peace.”\n\nAnd faintly dazed by flecks of changing gold,\nStraight through the shining trees he makes his way,\nAnd does not know the end will bring dismay.\nHe found the valley which he knew of old.\n\n“They bend and sway with glaring crimson bows.\nI dare the leap! But now--to whom to turn?\nThey made the long extinguished tinder burn,\nI hate them, yet I blaze to clasp them close.\n\nWhy does my gaze explore the distant peak?\nThe arching stair, the figures saturate\nWith sun? They never falter in their gait.\nTo none of these my tongue shall ever speak.\n\nTo match my whim (already vengeance neared!)\nI used to fashion stature, mouth, and eye.\nAmong the joyful rose my restless cry,\nIs beauty always cheap? I asked and sneered.\n\nBut now my anguish hungers for a mien\nOf sorrow, now a brow can strike me blind,\nLashes suffice to snare and sway my mind,\nAn arm entwined with rings of tourmaline.”\n\nHow could he bear to leave this mournful site\nAgain, when blooms of frost are dew, to weave\nThe dance with scarlet women and believe\nIn careless revelry and loud delight?\n\nCould he return once more to what he said\nFarewell that day, still yearning for its fill,\nTo life with parchments, true and tried, until\nRestoring dreams surround his lonely bed?\n\n\nStop your turning vanes, O mill,\nSo the heath may sleep at will.\nPonds await a thawing wind,\nRimmed with crystal lance on lance,\nAnd the little trees are lined\nUp like varnished woodwax plants.\n\nOn the blind and frozen tide\nWhite-clad children softly glide\nHomeward from communion, pray\nSilently to God whom learning\nSet aloof, while some essay\nPleas to Him who yields to yearning.\n\nDid a whistle shrill below?\nAll the candles faintly flow.\nWas it not like voices weeping?\nDark enchanters cast a spell,\nDraw their brides into their keeping.\nRing, O bell, ring out, O bell!\n\n\nWhile you listen to whispering flames,\nClose to your knee is my cheek and claims\nOnly a breath of your warmth. But the mad\nTides of blood to my temples show\nThat where you go I must not go,\nAnd bliss still leaves me chained and sad.\n\nWhen in pity you smooth my hair\nI am rewarded, and though I dare\nDisaster, I court your sublimity\n\nLike the devout who, in spite of their dread,\nDaily at Angelus turn their head\nTo a Madonna of ebony.\n\n\nWhy do you squander\nTears on a she?\nFoolish to ponder,\nWait and see\n\nIf in the valley\nSnow has gone,\nSouth wind will rally\nBlooms on the lawn.\n\nWill you be seeing\nHer unveiled\nStill before fleeing\nJune has paled?\n\nWhy do you squander\nTears on a she?\nFoolish to ponder,\nWait and see!\n\n\nAll youth (or\nSo it seems to you)\nCraves to be caught in flame.\nBut dawns and twilights flew,\nWhen, in your presence I was poised and calm.\n\nYou speak! I\nAlmost start in fright!\nCan I be wound\nIn so much zeal and light\nBy gay and childish laughter--empty sound!\n\nAnd later\n(Do not doubt I grieved!)\nGently your foot still fell,\nYour finger gently weaved,\nI spurned--and only then I praised you well.\n\nO sister,\nYou dislike this strain?\nWhen I depart,\nNever to come again,\nLet this enigma bind us heart to heart.\n\nTo ancient lands the vaulted passage calls,\nTapering shaft,\nAnd light through which the long-drawn strophe falls.\nAnd there I quaffed\nSun, when I fled the dragon’s dripping claws.\n\nA thorn impaled me at the garden gate.\nTearose, O yellow bloom,\nUnflawed by white, aglow and saturate,\nStrong and replete with doom.\nEven a drop of dew would mar your state.\n\nToo soon! I hanker after blandishment\nFirst violets confer.\nTo seldom flowers in hothouse frames I bent,\nAnd then, to float near her,\nI loosened from my kerchief kindred scent.", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "Pilgrimages", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1891" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "shepherds-day": { + "title": "“Shepherd’s Day”", + "body": "The herds were trotting from their winter quarters.\nTheir young attendant, after many months,\nAdvanced across the plain a river brightens.\nThe meadows, glad to be awakened, hailed\nWith sappy green, and fields sang out to him.\nBut smiling to himself, he walked the paths\nOf spring and was possessed with new divinings.\nHe used his staff to leap across the ford\nAnd lingered on the farther bank where gold,\nWhich lazy waves had washed from sand and stones,\nDelighted him, and fragile shells of many\nColours and contours presaged happiness.\nThe bleating of his lambs no longer held him.\nHe roved into the woods to cool ravines\nWhere plunging streams are steep between the boulders\nOn which the mosses drip, and bared and black\nThe roots of beeches branch. Beneath the silence\nAnd gentle motion of the vaulted tree-tops,\nHe closed his eyes and slept. The sun was high\nAnd scaly silver darted through the waters.\nWhen he awoke he climbed the peak and reached\nThe solemn rite of onward flowing light.\nHe prayed and crowned himself with sacred leaves,\nAnd up to warm and slowly shifting shadows\nOf clouds already dark, he launched his song.", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Book of Eclogues and Eulogies", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1894" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "transformation": { + "title": "“Transformation”", + "body": "On twilit paths when shadows fall,\nOver bridges and on toward tower and wall,\nWhen lilted cadences call,\n\n_In a golden chariot ferried\nOn pearl-grey pinions, and carried\nWhere scent of linden beguiles,\nSwing down to earth\nWith gentle smiles\nAnd anodyne breath._\n\nUnder the mast of a ship which forges away\nOver the glittering web of water and ray,\nEntranced to be free of the bay,\n\n_In a silver chariot ferried\nOn chrysolite mirrors, and carried\nWhere cinnabar vapour beguiles,\nSwing down to earth\nWith joyful smiles\nAnd sensuous breath._\n\nJubilant dyes of the end, and the sun floated under,\nBreakers snatch at the planks and tear them asunder,\nAnd tempests rumble and thunder.\n\n_In an iron chariot, ferried\nOn clods of lava, and carried\nWhere cinnabar vapour beguiles,\nSwing down to earth\nWith savage smiles\nAnd smouldering breath._", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "Odes", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1890" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + }, + "warning": { + "title": "“Warning”", + "body": "You follow hordes that hail you to a throne\nOf glaring yellow silk and massive gold,\nFrom which a rain of blood has often rolled\nWhile fires soared through seas of broken stone.\n\nNow hallow every murder, every lust!\nAs mad as surf against the cliffs your mind\nExults in icy and destroying gust\nAnd scorns the quiet well, the quiet wind.\n\nThey stammer their allegiance to your shoe,\nThe ravished women wail, and one is more\nDistraught and shameless in her fear: Before\nYour lordly eyes she tears her dress in two.\n\nThey bring you coral, diamonds, emeralds, pearls,\nAs if these were but common trumpery,\nThe priestess, whom her virgin mantle furls,\nCries: “Take me as your slave!” and bends her knee.\n\nAnd lonely through a savage scene you move,\nYour hair is fouled with offal from the street,\nYour pride impatient to frequent the groove\nWhich sordid creatures plotted with their feet.\n\nIs this, indeed, the land for which you warred?\nOh, disregard the voice that lured and lied!\nAnd do not say that sorrow was your guide,\nNor cast aside the’ raiment of a lord!\n\n\nThe squares are forsaken and silent the song and the lute.\nIn frantic search I sped\nThrough palace and church and where dances and tilts are afoot.\nHow many tears I shed,\nAnd still she fled from me!\nNor is she here, and yet I distinctly recall\nHow often these battlements beckoned, how turret and wall\nGave joyful prophecy.\n\nI fly from the place where I never have tasted of bliss,\nAnd roam through barren sand.\nAnd uphill and downhill the thistles leave barbs in my flesh,\nLike serpents the succulent creepers entwine the land.\n\nUp over here I see\nThe mountain-top: an island of pastoral green,\nA single Thuja tree,\nAnd bushes along the ledge.\nBelow--as if primitive masters had painted the scene--\nThe meadows and cities are patterned with spire and bridge.\nWhat new and varied goals!\nThe glory of evening melts into ochreous swirls.\nThe cup of a saffron surrenders its fragrance and furls,\nAnd silver manna falls.\n\n\nSovereign dream I trusted at heart,\nOh, that your daughters were mates of my mirth\nStauncher than those I encountered on earth.\n\nLong I watched them though I stood apart.\n\nGlittering peacocks tempt through the night,\nSpending the shudders we crave for delight,\nLarks at dawn with their passionate cry,\n\nYet majestic as a cloudless sky.\n\nIs the rejoicing in palpable tunes\nWhich in my mouth have resounded for moons,\nA new incarnation and core?\n\nShall I find my true domains once more?\n\n\nSilence despair!\nAlthough you long\n--But in vain--to possess,\nQuestion and bear,\nWith conquering song\nMaster distress.\n\nAnd so it was taught.\nHe patiently wrought,\nAnother year passed.\nBy south and by east\nDeluded at last\nHe wearily ceased.\n\nAn oak overhead,\nHe shovelled a grave\nFor mantle and stave,\nHe felt they were dead.\nFor quests I prepare,\nUnburdened by care.\n\nThe sluices broke,\nCurbed waters rose higher.\nHe fought down a tear\nAnd murmured: I fear\nOn this very oak\nI must shatter my lyre.\n\n\nDoff your mourning mien and vesture,\nYou are so immersed in grief,\nEven if I brought relief\nIt would seem a mocking gesture.\n\nWhy, when all the rest are keeping\nTrysts of gladness do you cling\nTo your pain, forever weeping\nWith the moon when fountains spring?\n\nThough the storm may lurk and lower\nAnd repeat a winter strain,\nMany a rose is still in flower,\nFar from ripened is the grain.\n\nDoes not faint desire flow\nOut from fingers calm and frosty?\nSing the quests of long ago\nLest our sonant string grow rusty.\n\n\nMy early visions! With the dead you vanished,\nI lack the strength to stay you in your flight,\nFrom lands that are my birthright I am banished,\nSo now I taste a splendour tinged with blight.\n\nBy rumours of enchantment seized and shaken,\nI see the herons, white and crimson, wheel\nAcross the valley’s blue expanse and waken\nThe nearby lake that sleeps and shines like steel.\n\nThere, as in symmetry of chords she paces,\nHer upward pointed finger lifts and takes\nHer shrouding garment by its silken laces,\nWhich in the night she wove of willow flakes.\n\nO subtle game: to guess through veils! Desires,\nSpurred by my longing, whispered we were one,\nBut half-concealed in vines with bloomy spires,\nDown to the nearby lake she glided o", + "metadata": { + "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "Pilgrimages", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1891" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Olga Marx", + "Ernst Morwitz" + ], + "tags": [ + "German" + ] + } + } + } + }, "khalil-gibran": { "metadata": { "key": "khalil-gibran", @@ -49303,7 +49738,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "St John’s College", + "college": "St John’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -51418,7 +51853,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Brasenose College", + "college": "Brasenose College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -52968,7 +53403,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -54472,12 +54907,12 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "St John’s College", + "college": "St John’s College", "level": "attended" }, { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Trinity Hall", + "college": "Trinity Hall", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -54976,21 +55411,43 @@ "name": "Georg Heym", "birth": { "time": { - "year": "1887" + "year": "1887", + "month": "october", + "day": 30 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Hirschberg", + "second": "Silesia", + "country": "German Empire" } }, "death": { "time": { - "year": "1912" + "year": "1912", + "month": "january", + "day": 16 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Gatow", + "second": "Berlin", + "country": "German Empire" } }, "gender": "male", + "education": [ + { + "institution": "University of Würzburg" + } + ], "nationalities": [ "germany" ], "languages": [ "German" ], + "movements": [ + "Expressionism" + ], "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Heym", "favorite": false, "tags": [ @@ -55165,7 +55622,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Keble College", + "college": "Keble College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -58203,7 +58660,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Pembroke College", + "college": "Pembroke College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -58536,7 +58993,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Balliol College", + "college": "Balliol College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -59466,7 +59923,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "St Anne’s College", + "college": "St Anne’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -60606,7 +61063,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "St Hilda’s College", + "college": "St Hilda’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -62618,7 +63075,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Corpus Christi College", + "college": "Corpus Christi College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -66601,7 +67058,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "St John’s College", + "college": "St John’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -70800,7 +71257,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "University College", + "college": "University College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -72164,7 +72621,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Gloucester Hall", + "college": "Gloucester Hall", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -73676,7 +74133,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Merton College", + "college": "Merton College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -76018,7 +76475,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Corpus Christi College", + "college": "Corpus Christi College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -76492,7 +76949,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -79178,7 +79635,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Clare College", + "college": "Clare College", "level": "attended" }, { @@ -85376,7 +85833,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Christ’s College", + "college": "Christ’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -86792,7 +87249,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Exeter College", + "college": "Exeter College", "level": "bachelors", "graduated": 1855 } @@ -91884,13 +92341,13 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Trinity College", + "college": "Trinity College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Oriel College", + "college": "Oriel College", "level": "masters" } ], @@ -92156,7 +92613,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Exeter College", + "college": "Exeter College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -100392,7 +100849,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Balliol College", + "college": "Balliol College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -102551,7 +103008,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Christ Church", + "college": "Christ Church", "level": "masters" } ], @@ -108420,7 +108877,10 @@ }, "tags": [ "English" - ] + ], + "context": { + "liturgy": "advent" + } } }, "the-lambs-of-grasmere": { @@ -113243,7 +113703,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "King’s College", + "college": "King’s College", "level": "attended" } ], @@ -114732,7 +115192,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "Clare College", + "college": "Clare College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -115201,7 +115661,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Somerville College", + "college": "Somerville College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -117826,7 +118286,10 @@ "tags": [ "Scottish", "Canadian" - ] + ], + "context": { + "season": "winter" + } } }, "the-passing-of-the-year": { @@ -121550,7 +122013,7 @@ }, { "institution": "Johns Hopkins University", - "subinstitution": "Peabody Institute", + "college": "Peabody Institute", "graduated": false }, { @@ -121814,7 +122277,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "University College", + "college": "University College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -123957,7 +124420,10 @@ "tags": [ "Serbian", "American" - ] + ], + "context": { + "season": "winter" + } } }, "poem-without-a-title": { @@ -124097,7 +124563,7 @@ }, "what-the-white-had-to-say": { "title": "“What The White Had To Say”", - "body": "For how could anything white be distinct\nfrom or divided from whiteness?\nMeister Eckhart\n\nBecause I am the bullet\nThat has gone through everyone already,\nI thought of you long before you thought of me.\nEach one of you still keeps a blood-stained handkerchief\nIn which to swaddle me, but it stays empty\nAnd even the wind won’t remain in it long.\nCleverly you’ve invented name after name for me,\nMixed the riddles, garbled the proverbs,\nShook you loaded dice in a tin cup,\nBut I do not answer back even to your curses,\nFor I am nearer to you than your breath.\nOne sun shines on us both through a crack in the roof.\nA spoon brings me through the window at dawn.\nA plate shows me off to the four walls\nWhile with my tail I swing at the flies.\nBut there’s no tail and the flies are your thoughts.\nSteadily, patiently I life your arms.\nI arrange them in the posture of someone drowning,\nAnd yet the sea in which you are sinking,\nAnd even this night above it, is myself.\n\nBecause I am the bullet\nThat has baptized each one of your senses,\nPoems are made of our lusty wedding nights …\nThe joy of words as they are written.\nThe ear that got up at four in the morning\nTo hear the grass grow inside a word.\nStill, the most beautiful riddle has no answer.\nI am the emptiness that tucks you in like a mockingbird’s nest,\nThe fingernail that scratched on your sleep’s blackboard.\nTake a letter: From cloud to onion.\nSay: There was never any real choice.\nOne gaunt shadowy mother wiped our asses,\nThe same old orphanage taught us loneliness.\nStreet-organ full of blue notes,\nI am the monkey dancing to your grinding--\nAnd still you are afraid-and so,\nIt’s as if we had not budged from the beginning.\nTime slopes. We are falling head over heels\nAt the speed of night. That milk tooth\nYou left under the pillow, it’s grinning.", + "body": "_For how could anything white be distinct from or divided from whiteness?_\n --Meister Eckhart\n\nBecause I am the bullet\nThat has gone through everyone already,\nI thought of you long before you thought of me.\nEach one of you still keeps a blood-stained handkerchief\nIn which to swaddle me, but it stays empty\nAnd even the wind won’t remain in it long.\nCleverly you’ve invented name after name for me,\nMixed the riddles, garbled the proverbs,\nShook you loaded dice in a tin cup,\nBut I do not answer back even to your curses,\nFor I am nearer to you than your breath.\nOne sun shines on us both through a crack in the roof.\nA spoon brings me through the window at dawn.\nA plate shows me off to the four walls\nWhile with my tail I swing at the flies.\nBut there’s no tail and the flies are your thoughts.\nSteadily, patiently I life your arms.\nI arrange them in the posture of someone drowning,\nAnd yet the sea in which you are sinking,\nAnd even this night above it, is myself.\n\nBecause I am the bullet\nThat has baptized each one of your senses,\nPoems are made of our lusty wedding nights …\nThe joy of words as they are written.\nThe ear that got up at four in the morning\nTo hear the grass grow inside a word.\nStill, the most beautiful riddle has no answer.\nI am the emptiness that tucks you in like a mockingbird’s nest,\nThe fingernail that scratched on your sleep’s blackboard.\nTake a letter: From cloud to onion.\nSay: There was never any real choice.\nOne gaunt shadowy mother wiped our asses,\nThe same old orphanage taught us loneliness.\nStreet-organ full of blue notes,\nI am the monkey dancing to your grinding--\nAnd still you are afraidand so,\nIt’s as if we had not budged from the beginning.\nTime slopes. We are falling head over heels\nAt the speed of night. That milk tooth\nYou left under the pillow, it’s grinning.", "metadata": { "language": "English", "tags": [ @@ -126200,15 +126666,35 @@ "name": "Vladimir Solovyov", "birth": { "time": { - "year": "1853" + "year": "1853", + "month": "january", + "day": 28 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Uzkoye", + "second": "Moscow", + "country": "Russian Empire" } }, "death": { "time": { - "year": "1900" + "year": "1900", + "month": "august", + "day": 13 + }, + "place": { + "second": "Moscow", + "country": "Russian Empire" } }, "gender": "male", + "religion": "Christian", + "education": [ + { + "institution": "Imperial Moscow University", + "level": "bachelors" + } + ], "nationalities": [ "russia" ], @@ -126272,12 +126758,25 @@ "name": "Reinhard Sorge", "birth": { "time": { - "year": "1892" + "year": "1892", + "month": "january", + "day": 29 + }, + "place": { + "second": "Berlin", + "country": "Germany" } }, "death": { "time": { - "year": "1916" + "year": "1916", + "month": "july", + "day": 20 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Ablaincourt-Pressoir", + "second": "Somme", + "country": "France" } }, "gender": "male", @@ -126287,6 +126786,9 @@ "languages": [ "German" ], + "movements": [ + "Expressionism" + ], "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Sorge", "favorite": false, "tags": [ @@ -126295,10 +126797,20 @@ }, "poems": { "in-far-flung-circles": { - "title": "“In Far-Flung Circles”", + "title": "“In far-flung circles …”", "body": "In far-flung circles you’ve plowed your flights\nThrough darkness and chaotic dreams, gigantic,\nThrough torments’ regions, caves of space, gigantic--\nRestless at dawn and restless in your nights …\n\nWhen your wild screams hoist you in a gyre\nOf father’s curse, and every mother’s pain;\nEternal procreation shows it’s not in vain--:\nSalvation mounts defiant from the mire …\n\nThen with your wings you’ll move that bolted gate\nWhose jawlike hinges crushed so many brains;\nYou love the longing leading to these pains,\nYou clutch it, reeling downward to your fate.", "metadata": { "language": "German", + "source": { + "title": "The Beggar", + "type": "book", + "published": { + "year": "1912" + } + }, + "translators": [ + "Walter H. and Jacqueline Sokel" + ], "tags": [ "German" ] @@ -126312,15 +126824,34 @@ "name": "Robert Southey", "birth": { "time": { - "year": "1774" + "year": "1774", + "month": "august", + "day": 12 + }, + "place": { + "second": "Bristol", + "country": "England" } }, "death": { "time": { - "year": "1843" + "year": "1843", + "month": "march", + "day": 21 + }, + "place": { + "second": "London", + "country": "England" } }, "gender": "male", + "education": [ + { + "institution": "University of Oxford", + "college": "Balliol College", + "level": "bachelors" + } + ], "nationalities": [ "england" ], @@ -126732,7 +127263,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "University College", + "college": "University College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -128820,7 +129351,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Balliol College", + "college": "Balliol College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -129760,7 +130291,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Balliol College", + "college": "Balliol College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -142428,7 +142959,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Ruskin School of Art", + "college": "Ruskin School of Art", "level": "masters" } ], @@ -143312,7 +143843,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Jesus College", + "college": "Jesus College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -147543,7 +148074,7 @@ }, { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "Magdalen College", + "college": "Magdalen College", "level": "masters" } ], @@ -149267,15 +149798,35 @@ "name": "P. G. Wodehouse", "birth": { "time": { - "year": "1881" + "year": "1881", + "month": "october", + "day": 15 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Guildford", + "second": "Surrey", + "country": "England" } }, "death": { "time": { - "year": "1975" + "year": "1975", + "month": "february", + "day": 14 + }, + "place": { + "first": "Southampton", + "second": "New York", + "country": "United States" } }, "gender": "male", + "education": [ + { + "institution": "Dulwich College", + "level": "secondary" + } + ], "nationalities": [ "england" ], @@ -149439,7 +149990,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Cambridge", - "subinstitution": "St John’s College", + "college": "St John’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" } @@ -150047,7 +150598,7 @@ "education": [ { "institution": "University of Oxford", - "subinstitution": "The Queen’s College", + "college": "The Queen’s College", "degree": "B.A.", "level": "bachelors" }