For since the time when Adam
first
Embraced his Eve in happy
hour,
And every bird of Eden burst
In carol, every bud to flower,
What eyes, like thine, have
waken’d hopes?
What lips, like thine, so
sweetly join’d?
Where on the double rosebud
droops
The fullness of the pensive
mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,
[1]
Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep
to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,
That lets thee [2] neither
hear nor see:
But break it. In the
name of wife,
And in the rights that name
may give,
Are clasp’d the moral
of thy life,
And that for which I care
to live.
[Foonote 1: 1842. The pensive mind that,
self-involved.]
[Foonote 2: 1842. Which lets thee.]
(No alteration since 1842.)
So, Lady Flora, take my lay,
And, if you find a meaning
there,
O whisper to your glass, and
say,
“What wonder, if he
thinks me fair?”
What wonder I was all unwise,
To shape the song for your
delight
Like long-tail’d birds
of Paradise,
That float thro’ Heaven,
and cannot light?
Or old-world trains, upheld
at court
By Cupid-boys of blooming
hue—
But take it—earnest
wed with sport,
And either sacred unto you.
AMPHION
First published in 1842. No alteration since
1850.
In this humorous allegory the poet bewails his unhappy
lot on having fallen on an age so unpropitious to
poetry, contrasting it with the happy times so responsive
to his predecessors who piped to a world prepared
to dance to their music. However, he must toil
and be satisfied if he can make a little garden blossom.
My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,
A garden too with scarce a tree
And waster than a warren:
Yet say the neighbours when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all
That grows within the woodland.
O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion, [1]
And ta’en my fiddle to the gate,
Nor cared for seed or scion!
And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta’en my fiddle to the gate,
And fiddled in the timber!
’Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,
Such happy intonation,
Wherever he sat down and sung
He left a small plantation;
Wherever in a lonely grove
He set up his forlorn pipes,
The gouty oak began to move,
And flounder into hornpipes.
The mountain stirr’d its bushy crown,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down
Coquetting with young beeches;
And briony-vine and ivy-wreath
Ran forward to his rhyming,
And from the valleys underneath
Came little copses climbing.
