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THE DESERTED HOUSE

LIFE and Thought have gone away
Side by side,

Leaving door and windows wide:
Careless tenants they!

All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before.

Close the door, the shutters close,
Or through the windows we shall see
The nakedness and vacancy

Of the dark deserted house.

Come away: no more of mirth

Is here or merry-making sound.
The house was builded of the earth,
And shall fall again to ground.

Come away: for Life and Thought
Here no longer dwell;
But in a city glorious-

A great and distant city-have bought
A mansion incorruptible.

Would they could have stayed with us!

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WHERE lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck's smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace;
Or, o'er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.

The Bourne

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On stormy nights, when wild north-westers rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast

Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.

And where the land she travels from? Away,

Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

Arthur Hugh Clough [1819-1861]

UP-HILL

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you waiting at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

Christina Georgina Rossetti [1830-1894]

THE BOURNE

UNDERNEATH the growing grass,
Underneath the living flowers,

Deeper than the sound of showers:
There we shall not count the hours

By the shadows as they pass.

Youth and health will be but vain,
Beauty reckoned of no worth:
There a very little girth

Can hold round what once the earth

Seemed too narrow to contain.

Christina Georgina Rossetti [1830-1894]

THE CONQUEROR WORM

Lo! 'tis a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theater to see

A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully

The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,

Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly;

Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.

That motley drama-oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in

To the self-same spot;

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see amid the mimic rout

A crawling shape intrude:

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!

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The City in the Sea

It writhes!-it writhes!-with mortal pangs!

The mimes become its food,

And seraphs sob at vermin fangs

In human gore imbued.

Out-out are the lights-out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"

And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849]

THE CITY IN THE SEA

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not)
Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently,
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free:
Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls,
Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls,
Up shadowy, long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers,
Up many and many marvelous shrine,
Whose wreathèd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,

While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye,-

Not the gaily-jeweled dead

Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas,
Along that wilderness of glass;

No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea;

No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene!

But lo, a stir is in the air!

The wave-there is a movement there!

As if the towers had thrust aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide;
As if their tops had feebly given

A void within the filmy Heaven!
The waves have now a redder glow,
The hours are breathing faint and low;
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.

Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849]

THE REAPER AND THE FLOWERS

THERE is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,

He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.

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