Short Poems

There was a Young Lady of Firle,
Whose hair was addicted to curl;
It curled up a tree, and all over the sea,
That expansive Young Lady of Firle.

Early, my God, without delay,
I haste to seek Thy face;
My thirsty spirit faints away
Without Thy cheering grace.
So pilgrims on the scorching sand
Beneath a burning sky
Long for a cooling stream at hand,
And they must drink or die.

Epigrams must be curt, nor seem
Tail-pieces to a poet's dream.
If they should anywhere be found
Serious, or musical in sound
Turn into prose the two worst pages
And you will rank among the sages.

Entertained by song and dance here in this wine pavilion,
truly a palace of paradise where the soul melts completely away!
Having mastered all the " postures of joy " the Buddhists talk about,
in one spring evening, twenty-five cases
of perfect enlightenment!

East of the salt village, low and narrow —
the huts of the seaside folk.
The sixth month come, they boil down the salt,
as if boiling in water themselves!
They step outside and stand for a while
in the raging sun:
for them, this moment out of doors
counts as cooling off.

Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?
To what sublime and star-ypaven home
Floatest thou?
I am the image of swift Plato's spirit,
Ascending heaven--Athens doth inherit
His corpse below.

Stepping through the sleet
that falls and collects in puddles,
shivering, shivering,
he follows

Dousing clean a thousand old cares,
sticking it out through a hundred pots of wine,
a good night needing the best of conversation,
a brilliant moon that will not let us sleep —
drunk we lie down in empty hills,
heaven and earth our quilt and pillow.

" Don't worry! " he says,
and then tells you something
that really gets you worried

Even on a spring morning
my Sicilian pipe makes a sound of autumn
retracing thoughts past thousands of years