The Lotus Eaters - Tennyson

The Lotos-eaters

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, 

"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." 

In the afternoon they came unto a land 

In which it seemed always afternoon. 

All round the coast the languid air did swoon, 

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. 

Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; 

And like a downward smoke, the slender stream 

Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem. 

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, 

Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; 

And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, 

Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. 

They saw the gleaming river seaward flow 

From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, 

Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, 

Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops, 

Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse. 

The charmed sunset linger'd low adown 

In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale 

Was seen far inland, and the yellow down 

Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale 

And meadow, set with slender galingale; 

A land where all things always seem'd the same! 

And round about the keel with faces pale, 

Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, 

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came. 

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, 

Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave 

To each, but whoso did receive of them, 

And taste, to him the gushing of the wave 

Far far away did seem to mourn and rave 

On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, 

His voice was thin, as voices from the grave; 

And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, 

And music in his ears his beating heart did make. 

They sat them down upon the yellow sand, 

Between the sun and moon upon the shore; 

And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, 

Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore 

Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, 

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 

Then some one said, "We will return no more"; 

And all at once they sang, "Our island home 

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam." 

CHORIC SONG 

I 

There is sweet music here that softer falls 

Than petals from blown roses on the grass, 

Or night-dews on still waters between walls 

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; 

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, 

Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; 

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. 

Here are cool mosses deep, 

And thro' the moss the ivies creep, 

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, 

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep." 

II 

Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness, 

And utterly consumed with sharp distress, 

While all things else have rest from weariness? 

All things have rest: why should we toil alone, 

We only toil, who are the first of things, 

And make perpetual moan, 

Still from one sorrow to another thrown: 

Nor ever fold our wings, 

And cease from wanderings, 

Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm; 

Nor harken what the inner spirit sings, 

"There is no joy but calm!" 

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things? 

III 

Lo! in the middle of the wood, 

The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud 

With winds upon the branch, and there 

Grows green and broad, and takes no care, 

Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon 

Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow 

Falls, and floats adown the air. 

Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light, 

The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, 

Drops in a silent autumn night. 

All its allotted length of days 

The flower ripens in its place, 

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, 

Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. 

IV 

Hateful is the dark-blue sky, 

Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea. 

Death is the end of life; ah, why 

Should life all labour be? 

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 

And in a little while our lips are dumb. 

Let us alone. What is it that will last? 

All things are taken from us, and become 

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 

To war with evil? Is there any peace 

In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 

In silence; ripen, fall and cease: 

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. 

V 

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, 

With half-shut eyes ever to seem 

Falling asleep in a half-dream! 

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, 

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height; 

To hear each other's whisper'd speech; 

Eating the Lotos day by day, 

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, 

And tender curving lines of creamy spray; 

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly 

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; 

To muse and brood and live again in memory, 

With those old faces of our infancy 

Heap'd over with a mound of grass, 

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass! 

VI 

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, 

And dear the last embraces of our wives 

And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change: 

For surely now our household hearths are cold, 

Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: 

And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. 

Or else the island princes over-bold 

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings 

Before them of the ten years' war in Troy, 

And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things. 

Is there confusion in the little isle? 

Let what is broken so remain. 

The Gods are hard to reconcile: 

'Tis hard to settle order once again. 

There is confusion worse than death, 

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, 

Long labour unto aged breath, 

Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars 

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. 

VII 

But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, 

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) 

With half-dropt eyelid still, 

Beneath a heaven dark and holy, 

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly 

His waters from the purple hill— 

To hear the dewy echoes calling 

From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine— 

To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling 

Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine! 

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, 

Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine. 

VIII 

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak: 

The Lotos blows by every winding creek: 

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone: 

Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone 

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown. 

We have had enough of action, and of motion we, 

Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, 

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. 

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, 

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined 

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. 

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd 

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd 

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: 

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, 

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, 

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. 

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song 

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, 

Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; 

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, 

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, 

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil; 

Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper'd—down in hell 

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, 

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. 

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; 

O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Ode to Autumn - John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821)

English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.

Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelleyand William Wordsworth. The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymionbut recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.

Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion” (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous existence.”

In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished “Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn," “Ode on Melancholy," and “Ode to a Nightingale.” The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion.

The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

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Selected Bibliography

Poetry

The Poems of John Keats (1978)

The Poems of John Keats (1970)

The Poems of John Keats (1970)

Collections: The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats(1831)

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)

Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)

Poems (1817)

Prose

Letters of John Keats: A New Selection (1970)

The Letters of John Keats (1958)

Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848)

Drama

Otho The Great: A Dramatic Fragment (1819)

King Stephen: A Dramatic Fragment (1819)

 Ode to Autumn - John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, 

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: 

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 

   Steady thy laden head across a brook; 

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, 

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? 

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— 

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; 

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft 

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; 

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Ode to the West Wind - P. B. Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England. The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, with one brother and four sisters, he stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather’s considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament. He attended Eton College for six years beginning in 1804, and then went on to Oxford University. He began writing poetry while at Eton, but his first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he voiced his own heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi. That same year, Shelley and another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published a pamphlet of burlesque verse, “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson," and with his sister Elizabeth, Shelley published Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire. In 1811, Shelley continued this prolific outpouring with more publications, including another pamphlet that he wrote and circulated with Hogg titled “The Necessity of Atheism," which got him expelled from Oxford after less than a year’s enrollment.  Shelley could have been reinstated if his father had intervened, but this would have required his disavowing the pamphlet and declaring himself Christian. Shelley refused, which led to a complete break between Shelley and his father. This left him in dire financial straits for the next two years, until he came of age.

That same year, at age nineteen, Shelley eloped to Scotland with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook. Once married, Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem emerged from Shelley’s friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin’s freethinking Socialist philosophy. Shelley also became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary, and in 1814 they eloped to Europe. After six weeks, out of money, they returned to England. In November 1814 Harriet Shelley bore a son, and in February 1815 Mary Godwin gave birth prematurely to a child who died two weeks later. The following January, Mary bore another son, named William after her father. In May the couple went to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent a great deal of time with George Gordon, Lord Byron, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics, including ghosts and spirits, into the night. During one of these ghostly “seances," Byron proposed that each person present should write a ghost story. Mary’s contribution to the contest became the novel Frankenstein. That same year, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. In December 1816 Harriet Shelley apparently committed suicide. Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary Godwin officially were married. Shelley lost custody of his two children by Harriet because of his adherence to the notion of free love.

In 1817, Shelley produced Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem that, because it contained references to incest as well as attacks on religion, was withdrawn after only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). At this time, he also wrote revolutionary political tracts signed “The Hermit of Marlow.” Then, early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time. During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron.

On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan.

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Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s Fair Copy Book, Bodleian Ms. Shelley Adds (1969)

A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812)

A Philosophical View of Reform (1920)

A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom, as The Hermit of Marlow (1817)

A Refutation of Deism: in a Dialogue (1814)

Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion etc. (1821)

Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude; and Other Poems (1816)

An Address, to the Irish People (1812)

Epipsychidion (1821)

Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840)

Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (1822)

Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century (1818)

Note books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, From the Originals in the Library of W. K. Bixby (1911)

Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy. In Two Acts(1820)

Original Poetry (1810)

Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810)

Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)

Prometheus Unbound. A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems (1820)

Proposals for An Association of those Philanthropists (1812)

Queen Mab; a Philosophical Poem: with Notes (1813)

Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems (1819)

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (1977)

Shelley’s Prose; or The Trumpet of a Prophecy (1954)

St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian. A Romance, as a Gentleman of the University of Oxford (1811)

The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley (1969)

The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1926)

The Esdaile Notebook. A volume of early poems (1964)

The Esdaile Poems (1966)

The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics (1985)

The Masque of Anarchy. A Poem (1832)

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

The Wandering Jew. A Poem (1887)

Zastrozzi (1810)

Prose

Letters From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener (1890)

Letters from Percy Bysshe Shelley to William Godwin (1891)

Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1882)

Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822 (1961)

The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1964)

The Shelley Correspondence in the Bodleian Library: Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley and others (1926)

Drama

The Cenci. A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1819)

(Source : https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/percy-bysshe-shelley)

Ode to the West Wind

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I 

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, 

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 

Each like a corpse within its grave, until 

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 

With living hues and odours plain and hill: 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; 

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! 

II 

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, 

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, 

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread 

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, 

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 

Of the horizon to the zenith's height, 

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 

Of the dying year, to which this closing night 

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 

Vaulted with all thy congregated might 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere 

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! 

III 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 

Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, 

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, 

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 

Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers 

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou 

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, 

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! 

IV 

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; 

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; 

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 

The impulse of thy strength, only less free 

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even 

I were as in my boyhood, and could be 

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, 

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 

Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! 

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! 

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd 

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. 

V 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 

What if my leaves are falling like its own! 

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth! 

And, by the incantation of this verse, 

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth 

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, 

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?