grief

How can I then return in happy plight
That am debarred the benefit of rest?
When day's oppression is not eased by night,
But day by night, and night by day oppressed?
And each, though enemies to either's reign,
Do in consent shake hands to torture me,
The one by toil, the other to complain
How far I toil, still farther off from thee.
I tell the day, to please him, thou art bright
And dost him grace when clouds do blot the heaven;
So flatter I the swart-complexioned night,

Lo, here the impost of a faith unfeigning
That love hath paid, and her disdain extorted,
Behold the message of my just complaining
That shows the world how much my grief imported.
These tributary plaints fraught with desire,
I send those eyes the cabinets of love;
The Paradise whereto my hopes aspire
From out this hell, which mine afflictions prove.
Wherein I thus do live cast down from mirth,
Pensive alone, none but despair about me;
My joys abortive, perish'd at their birth,

Yet read at last the story of my woe,
The dreary abstracts of my endless cares,
With my life's sorrow interlined so,
Smok'd with my sighs and blotted with my tears,
The sad memorials of my miseries,
Penn'd in the grief of mine afflicted ghost,
My life's complaint in doleful elegies,
With so pure love as Time could never boast.
Receive the incense which I offer here,
By my strong faith ascending to thy fame,
My zeal, my hope, my vows, my praise, my prayer,
My soul's oblation to thy sacred name,

At the Author's Going into Italy

O whether (poor forsaken) wilt thou go,
To go from sorrow and thine own distress,
When every place presents the face of woe,
And no remove can make thy sorrow less?
Yet go (forsaken), leave these woods, these plains;
Leave her and all, and all for her that leaves
Thee and thy love forlorn, and both disdains,
And of both wrongful deems and ill conceives.
Seek out some place, and see if any place
Give give the least release unto thy grief,

These plaintive verses, the Posts of my desire,
Which haste for succour to her slow regard:
Bear not report of any slender fire,
Forging a grief to win a fame's reward.
Nor are my passions limn'd for outward hue,
For that no colors can depaint my sorrows;
Delia herself and all the world may view
Best in my face, how cares hath till'd deep forrows.
No Bays I seek to deck my mourning brow,
O clear-eyed Rector of the holy Hill;
My humble accents crave the Olive bough,
Of her mild pity and relenting will.

Go, wailing verse, the infants of my love,
Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:
Present the image of the cares I prove;
Witness your Father's grief exceeds all other.
Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds,
With interrupted accents of despair:
A monument that whosoever reads
May justly praise, and blame my loveless Fair.
Say her disdain hath dried up my blood,
And starved you, in succours still denying;
Press to her eyes, importune me some good;
Waken her sleeping pity with your crying.

Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes,
Indeed the product of my heart and brain?
How strange that on my ear the rhythmic strain
Falls like faint memories of far-off times!
When did I feel the sorrow, act the part,
Which I have striv'n to shadow forth in song?
In what dead century swept that mingled throng
Of mighty pains and pleasures through my heart?
Not in the yesterdays of that still life
Which I have passed so free and far from strife,
But somewhere in this weary world I know,

I know not why, but all this weary day,
Suggested by no definite grief or pain,
Sad fancies have been flitting through my brain;
Now it has been a vessel losing way,
Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray
Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main;
And then, a banner, drooping in the rain,
And meadows beaten into bloody clay.
Strolling at random with this shadowy woe
At heart, I chanced to wander hither! Lo!
A league of desolate marsh-land, with its lush,
Hot grasses in a noisome, tide-left bed,

Grief dies like joy; the tears upon my cheek
Will disappear like dew. Dear God! I know
Thy kindly Providence hath made it so,
And thank thee for the law. I am too weak
To make a friend of Sorrow, or to wear,
With that dark angel ever by my side
(Though to thy heaven there be no better guide),
A front of manly calm. Yet, for I hear
How woe hath cleansed, how grief can deify,
So weak a thing it seems that grief should die,
And love and friendship with it, I could pray,
That if it might not gloom upon my brow,

Not in this chamber only at my birth—
When the long hours of that mysterious night
Were over, and the morning was in sight—
I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth
I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;
And never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light,
Child of all mothers, native of the earth.

So is no warmth for me at any fire
To-day, when the world's fire has burned so low;
I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,