Several Questions Answered

What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

The look of love alarms
Because 'tis fill'd with fire;
But the look of soft deceit
Shall Win the lover's hire.

Soft Deceit & Idleness,
These are Beauty's sweetest dress.

He who binds to himself a joy
Dot the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.


William Blake

Bored And Sad

It's boring and sad, and there's no one around
In times of my spirit's travail...
Desires!...What use is our vain and eternal desire?..
While years pass on by - all the best years!

To love...but love whom?.. a short love is vexing,
And permanent love's just a myth.
Perhaps look within? - The past's left no trace:
All trivial, joys and distress...

What good are the passions? For sooner or later
Their sweet sickness ends when reason speaks up;
And life, if surveyed with cold-blooded regard,-
Is stupid and empty - a joke...

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov

I Sit and Think

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall never see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode

I.

I come from fields of fractured ice,
Whose wounds are cured by squeezing,
Melting they cool, but in a trice,
Get warm again by freezing.
Here, in the frosty air, the sprays
With fernlike hoar-frost bristle,
There, liquid stars their watery rays
Shoot through the solid crystal.


II.

I come from empyrean fires --
From microscopic spaces,
Where molecules with fierce desires,
Shiver in hot embraces.
The atoms clash, the spectra flash,
Projected on the screen,
The double D, magnesian b,
And Thallium's living green.


III.

We place our eye where these dark rays
Unite in this dark focus,
Right on the source of power we gaze,
Without a screen to cloak us.
Then where the eye was placed at first,
We place a disc of platinum,
It glows, it puckers! will it burst?
How ever shall we flatten him!


IV.

This crystal tube the electric ray
Shows optically clean,
No dust or haze within, but stay!
All has not yet been seen.
What gleams are these of heavenly blue?
What air-drawn form appearing,
What mystic fish, that, ghostlike, through
The empty space is steering?


V.

I light this sympathetic flame,
My faintest wish that answers,
I sing, it sweetly sings the same,
It dances with the dancers.
I shout, I whistle, clap my hands,
And stamp upon the platform,
The flame responds to my commands,
In this form and in that form.


VI.

What means that thrilling, drilling scream,
Protect me! 'tis the siren:
Her heart is fire, her breath is steam,
Her larynx is of iron.
Sun! dart thy beams! in tepid streams,
Rise, viewless exhalations!
And lap me round, that no rude sound
May max my meditations.


VII.

Here let me pause. -- These transient facts,
These fugitive impressions,
Must be transformed by mental acts,
To permanent possessions.
Then summon up your grasp of mind,
Your fancy scientific,
Till sights and sounds with thought combined,
Become of truth prolific.


VIII.

Go to! prepare your mental bricks,
Fetch them from every quarter,
Firm on the sand your basement fix
With best sensation mortar.
The top shall rise to heaven on high --
Or such an elevation,
That the swift whirl with which we fly
Shall conquer gravitation.

James Clerk Maxwell

Vitam Impendere Amori

To Threaten Life for Love

Love is dead within your arms
Do you remember his encounter
He’s dead you restore the charms
He returns at your encounter

Another spring of springs gone past
I think of all its tenderness
Farewell season done at last
You’ll return as tenderly

****

In the evening light that’s faded
Where our several loves brush by
Your memory lies enchained
Far from our shades that die

O hands bound by memory
Burning like a funeral pyre
Where the last black Phoenix
Perfection comes to respire

Link by link the chain wears thin
Deriding us your memory
Flies ah hear it you who rail
I kneel again at your feet

****

You’ve not surprised my secret yet
Already the cortège moves on
But left to us is the regret
of there being no connivance none

The rose floats at the water’s edge
The maskers have passed by in crowds
It trembles in me like a bell
This heavy secret you ask now

****

Evening falls and in the garden
Women tell their histories
to Night that not without disdain
spills their dark hair’s mysteries

Little children little children
Your wings have flown away
But you rose that defend yourself
Throw your unrivalled scents away

For now’s the hour of petty theft
Of plumes of flowers and of tresses
Gather the fountain jets so free
Of whom the roses are mistresses

****

You descended through the water clear
I drowned my self so in your glance
The soldier passes she leans down
Turns and breaks away a branch

You float on nocturnal waves
The flame is my own heart reversed
Coloured as that comb’s tortoiseshell
The wave that bathes you mirrors well

****
O my abandoned youth is dead
Like a garland faded
Here the season comes again
Of suspicion and disdain

The landscape’s formed of canvasses
A false stream of blood flows down
And under the tree the stars glow fresh
The only passer by’s a clown

The glass in the frame has cracked
An air defined uncertainly
Hovers between sound and thought
Between ‘to be’ and memory

O my abandoned youth is dead
Like a garland faded
Here the season comes again
Of suspicion and disdain

Guillaume Apollinaire

Will you come along with me

I.
Will you come along with me,
In the fresh spring-tide,
My comforter to be
Through the world so wide?
Will you come and learn the ways
A student spends his days,
On the bonny, bonny braes
Of our ain burnside?


II.
For the lambs will soon be here,
In the fresh spring-tide;
As lambs come every year
On our ain burnside.
Poor things, they will not stay,
But we will keep the day
When first we saw them play
On our ain burnside.


III.
We will watch the budding trees
In the fresh spring-tide,
While the murmurs of the breeze
Through the branches glide.
Where the mavis builds her nest,
And finds both work and rest,
In the bush she loves the best,
On our ain burnside.


IV.
And the life we then shall lead
In the fresh spring-tide,
Will make thee mine indeed,
Though the world be wide.
No stranger’s blame or praise
Shall turn us from the ways
That brought us happy days
On our ain burnside.

James Clerk Maxwell

I Go Out On The Road Alone

Alone I set out on the road;
The flinty path is sparkling in the mist;
The night is still. The desert harks to God,
And star with star converses.

The vault is overwhelmed with solemn wonder
The earth in cobalt aura sleeps. . .
Why do I feel so pained and troubled?
What do I harbor: hope, regrets?

I see no hope in years to come,
Have no regrets for things gone by.
All that I seek is peace and freedom!
To lose myself and sleep!

But not the frozen slumber of the grave...
I'd like eternal sleep to leave
My life force dozing in my breast
Gently with my breath to rise and fall;

By night and day, my hearing would be soothed
By voices sweet, singing to me of love.
And over me, forever green,
A dark oak tree would bend and rustle.

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov