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Desideria
Surprised by a moment of joy, the speaker turns instinctively to share it with someone buried in the grave, and the return of that knowledge—together with the discovery that he had briefly forgotten—becomes the worst pang except the moment of the loss itself.
From ‘Arcades’
A singer invites the listener to follow him across untrodden green and under star-proof elms to where a rural Queen sits clad in splendour befitting her deity.
Ae Fond Kiss
A lover marks one last kiss and a final parting, says no star of hope is left him, insists that to see her was to love her for ever, and wishes her every joy while judging that never to have met would have spared the heartbreak.
An Epitaph
The epitaph refuses extended praise for a woman who declined courtship in life, sketches her chastity, modesty and daily reckoning with heaven, then concludes that all such praise is too weak and that her being dead says more.
A Dialogue
Man and Saviour speak by turns: man calls his soul worthless and resigns the whole design, the Saviour replies that the reckoning is not his to make and recalls the glory freely parted with for him, and man breaks in to stop the speech, saying it breaks his heart.
A Red, Red Rose
In Scots, love begins with rose and melody, expands toward impossible duration, and closes with a promise to return across ten thousand miles.
Uphill
A question-and-answer journey climbs all day toward an inn at night, where the door will open and every traveller will find a bed.
WRONG not, sweet empress of my heart
The speaker asks his lady not to assume that a lover who sues for no compassion feels no pain, argues that silence in love shows more woe than witty speech, and returns to the opening plea.
A Meditation for his Mistress
Seven stanzas liken the beloved to tulip, gillyflower, rosebud, vine, enclosed balm and violet, each comparison turning on how quickly the thing perishes, and close by telling her she must die, as must the maker of the song.
For Music
The speaker tells the addressee that their voice works like music over water, holding the waves still and the winds dreaming, so that the listening spirit bows in adoration while the midnight moon lies on a gently breathing sea.
Blackrobe Lane
By Vermilion Bird Bridge, wild grasses are in flower; at the mouth of Blackrobe Lane the evening sun slants. The swallows that once nested before the halls of Wang and Xie now fly into the houses of ordinary people.
乌衣巷
On the Ninth Day of the Ninth Month, Remembering My Brothers
Alone in another region, a stranger there, at every festival I think of my kin twice as much. From far off I know my brothers are on the heights, and where all wear dogwood, one man is missing.
九月九日忆山东兄弟
Full fathom five thy father lies
A sea song transforms a drowned father into coral and pearl, turning death into a rich and strange change sounded by a ritual knell.
His Pilgrimage
The speaker outfits himself with emblematic pilgrim's gear—scallop-shell, staff, scrip, bottle and gown—and imagines his soul travelling over silver mountains to nectar fountains where its thirst ends.
YOU spotted snakes with double tongue
Fairies warn snakes, hedgehogs, spiders, beetles and snails away from their sleeping queen, with a sung lullaby refrain answering each set of warnings.
Bonnie Lesley
Watching bonnie Lesley go over the Border like Alexander gone to spread her conquests farther, the speaker says that to see her is to love her for ever since Nature never made another like her, hails her as a queen whose subjects men are, imagines even the Devil looking into her face and owning 'I canna wrang thee', and ends by asking her to return to Caledonia so her countrymen may brag of her.
A Liangzhou Song
Fine grape wine in a cup that shines at night; just as we would drink, the pipa on horseback urges us. If I lie drunk on the battlefield, do not laugh at me— how many, since ancient times, have come back from war?
凉州词
Delight in Disorder
A list of slightly disarranged details of dress—a thrown lawn, a straying lace, a careless shoe-string—builds to the claim that such 'wild civility' bewitches the speaker more than art that is too precise in every part.
The Triumph
The speaker calls onlookers to see his lady ride in Love's chariot, praises her eyes, hair and brow, and closes with a run of comparisons drawn from touch, smell and taste.
Out Beyond the Passes
The bright moon of Qin, the frontier pass of Han; from the march of ten thousand li the men have not returned. If only the Flying General of Longcheng were here, he would not let the Hu horses cross the Yin Mountains.
出塞
To Lucasta, going to the Wars
A soldier frames departure for war as a conflict between love and honour, insisting that constancy to honour makes his love more worthy.
The Ecstasy
Two lovers sit motionless on a violet-topped bank with hands cemented and eye-beams threaded together while their souls go out to negotiate between them, and the text stops with the pair lying silent like tomb statues all day.
On first looking into Chapman’s Homer
The speaker likens years of reading to travel through golden realms and western islands, says he never breathed the pure air of Homer's domain until he heard Chapman, and compares the moment to an astronomer sighting a new planet and to explorers staring silently at an unknown ocean.
Evening on Calais Beach
A sonnet in which the holy quiet of a seaside evening is likened to a nun breathless with adoration, before the speaker calls the listener to hear a mighty Being awake whose eternal motion makes a sound like thunder, and then turns to the child walking beside him to say that her seeming unconcern makes her nature no less divine.