Or gay quinquenniads would we reap 3 Ah, yet would I—and would I might! That I might kiss those eyes awake! To choose your own you did not care; My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', Perforce will still revert to you; The prelude to some brighter world. 4 For since the time when Adam first 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. 11842. The pensive mind that, self-involved. EPILOGUE No alteration since 1843. So, Lady Flora, take my lay, And, if you find a meaning there, "What wonder, if he thinks me fair?" To shape the song for your delight That float thro' Heaven, and cannot light? By Cupid-boys of blooming hue— But take it—earnest wed with sport, AMPHION First published in 1843. 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, And waster than a warren: Yet say the neighbours when they call, And in it is the germ of all That grows within the woodland. O had I lived when song was great 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! 1Amphion was no doubt capable of performing all the feats here attributed to him, but there is no record of them; he appears to have confined himself to charming the stones into their places when Thebes was being built. Tennyson seems to have confounded him with Orpheus. 'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown, The linden broke her ranks and rent The poplars, in long order due, The shock-head willows two and two Came wet-shot alder from the wave, Each pluck'd his one foot from the grave, Old elms came breaking from the vine, And, sweating rosin, plump'd the pine And wasn't it a sight to see When, ere his song was ended, Like some great landslip, tree by tree, 1 Till 1857 these four lines ran thus :--- The birch-tree swang her fragrant hair, The gin within the juniper Began to make him merry. And shepherds from the mountain-caves Look'd down, half-pleased, half-frighten'd, As dash d about the drunken leaves The random sunshine lighten'd! Oh, nature first was fresh to men, You moved her at your pleasure. 'Tis vain! in such a brassy age But what is that I hear? a sound O Lord!—'tis in my neighbour's ground, They read Botanic Treatises. And works on Gardening thro" there, The wither'd Misses! how they prose But these, tho' fed with careful dirt, Half-conscious of the garden-squirt, And I must work thro' months of toil, To grow my own plantation. A little garden blossom. ST. AGNES This exquisite little poem was first published in 1837 in the Keepsake, an annual edited by Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, and was included in the edition of 1842. No alteration has been made in it since 1842. In 1857 the title was altered from "St. Agnes" to "St. Agnes' Eve," thus bringing it near to Keats' poem, which certainly influenced Tennyson in writing it, as a comparison of the opening of the two poems will show. The saint from whom the poem takes its name was a young girl of thirteen who suffered martyrdom in the reign of Diocletian: she is a companion to Sir Galahad. Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon : My breath to heaven like vapour goes: The shadows of the convent-towers Still creeping with the creeping hours Make Thou 2 my spirit pure and clear Or this first snowdrop of the That in my bosom lies. year As these white robes are soiled and dark, To yonder shining ground; As this pale taper's earthly spark, To yonder argent round; 1 All editions up to and including 1850. The poor things look unhappy. 2 In Keepsake: not capital in Thou. 3 In Keepsake: On. |