With the sweet dance your heart must keep to night. What would you take all beauty and delight And say, sweet lamb, would you not learn the sweet And subtle mystery by which spirits meet? THE BIRTH OF PLEASURE AT the creation of the Earth Of an ever-lengthening line The Birth of Pleasure. Forman || no title, Garnett. Published by Garnett, 1862, and dated, 1819. LOVE, HOPE, DESIRE, AND FEAR AND many there were hurt by that strong boy; His name, they said, was Pleasure. And near him stood, glorious beyond measure, Four Ladies who possess all empery In earth and air and sea; Nothing that lives from their award is free. And they the regents are Of the four elements that frame the heart,- Upon that poor domain. Desire presented her [false] glass, and then Was spellbound to embrace what seemed so fair And, dazed by that bright error, It would have scorned the [shafts] of the avenger, Touched with her palsying spear,— So that, as if a frozen torrent, The blood was curdled in its current ; It dared not speak, even in look or motion, But chained within itself its proud devotion. Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear. Published by Garnett, 1862, and dated, 1821. Between Desire and Fear thou wert A wretched thing, poor Heart! Sad was his life who bore thee in his breast, Wild bird for that weak nest. Till Love even from fierce Desire it bought, upon And after long and vain endurance At one birth these four were born O weak heart of little wit The fair hand that wounded it, A SATIRE ON SATIRE IF gibbets, axes, confiscations, chains, Are the true secrets of the commonweal To make men wise and just; And not the sophisms of revenge and fear, Then send the priests to every hearth and home If Satire's scourge could wake the slumbering hounds Of Conscience, or erase the deeper wounds, The leprous scars of callous infamy; If it could make the present not to be, Or charm the dark past never to have been, A Satire on Satire. Published by Dowden, Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles, 1880, and dated, 1820. Flash on his sight the spectres of the past, Until his mind's eye paint thereon Let scorn like yawn below, And rain on him like flakes of fiery snow. Men take a sullen and a stupid pride In being all they hate in others' shame, and, beside, 'Tis not worth while to prove, as I could, how If any friend would take Southey some day, Softening harsh words with friendship's gentle tone, How incorrect his public conduct is, And what men think of it, 'twere not amiss. Far better than to make innocent ink GINEVRA WILD, pale, and wonder-stricken, even as one Who staggers forth into the air and sun From the dark chamber of a mortal fever, Bewildered, and incapable, and ever Ginevra. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824, and dated, Pisa, 1821. |