Digby Mackworth Dolben

Digby Mackworth Dolben Poems

Beautiful, oh beautiful-
In all the mountain passes
The plenteous dowers of April showers,
Which every spring amasses,
...

Tell us, tell us, holy shepherds,
What at Bethlehem you saw.-
'Very God of Very God
'Asleep amid the straw.'
...

Here in the flats that encompass the hills called Beautiful, lying,
O Beloved, behold a Pilgrim who fain would be sleeping,
...

Come to me, Belovèd,
Babe of Bethlehem;
Lay aside Thy Sceptre
And Thy Diadem.
...

Beyond the calumny and wrong,
Beyond the clamour and the throng,
Beyond the praise and triumph-song
He passed.
...

My Love, and once again my Love,
And then no more until the end,
Until the waters cease to move,
Until we rest within the Ark,
...

On the tender myrtle-branches,
In the meadow lotus-grassèd,
While the wearied sunlight softly
To the Happy Islands passèd,-
...

I asked for Peace-
My sins arose,
And bound me close,
I could not find release.
...

My sister Death! I pray thee come to me
Of thy sweet charity,
And be my nurse but for a little while;
I will indeed lie still,
...

O, a moon face
In a shadowy place.

Lean over me-ah so,-let fall
...

From falsehood and error,
From darkness and terror,
From all that is evil,
From the power of the devil,
...

In the days before the high tide
Swept away the towers of sand
Built with so much care and labour
By the children of the land,
...


'Twas not in shady cloister that God set His chosen one,
But in the van of battle and the streets of Babylon:
...

ErwV ImeroV te.

I said to my heart,-'I am tired,
Am tired of loving in vain;
...

Thou liest dead,-lie on: of thee
No sweet remembrances shall be,
Who never plucked Pierian rose,
Who never chanced on Anterôs.
...

The sun has set.
The western light
And after that
The starlit night
...

Press each on each, sweet wings, and roof me in
Some closèd cell to hold my weariness,
Desired-as from unshadowed plains to win
...

18.

Where in dawnward Sicily
Gentle rivers wed the sea,
Bitter life was given me.
...

Think, kind Jesu, my salvation
Caused Thy wondrous Incarnation,
Leave me not to reprobation.
Faint and weary Thou hast sought me,
...

20.

The world is young today:
Forget the gods are old,
Forget the years of gold
When all the months were May
...

Digby Mackworth Dolben Biography

Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben (8 February 1848 – 28 June 1867) was an English poet who died young from drowning. He owes his poetic reputation to his cousin, Robert Bridges, poet laureate from 1913 to 1930, who edited a partial edition of his verse, Poems, in 1911. He was born in Guernsey, and brought up at Finedon Hall in Northamptonshire. His father, William Harcourt Isham Mackworth (1806—1872), a younger son of Sir Digby Mackworth, the 3rd Baronet, took the additional surname Dolben after he married Frances, the heiress of Sir John English Dolben, the 4th Baronet. He was educated at Eton College, studying under the influential Master William Johnson Cory whose principles of pedagogy and collection of verses Ionica inspired his own poetry. At Eton, his distant cousin Bridges was his senior and took him under his wing. Dolben caused considerable scandal at school by his exhibitionist behaviour. He marked his romantic attachment to another pupil a year older than him, Martin Le Marchant Gosselin, by writing love poetry. He also defied his strict Protestant upbringing by joining a High Church Puseyite group of pupils. He then claimed allegiance to the Order of St Benedict, affecting a monk's habit. He was considering a conversion to Roman Catholicism. In 1865 on his seventeenth birthday, he was introduced by Bridges, by then an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to Gerard Manley Hopkins who was at Balliol. According to the account given by his biographer Norman White, this encounter caused Hopkins a great deal of perturbation.)

The Best Poem Of Digby Mackworth Dolben

Beautiful, Oh Beautiful--

Beautiful, oh beautiful-
In all the mountain passes
The plenteous dowers of April showers,
Which every spring amasses,
To bring about thro' summer drought
The blossoming of the grasses.


Beautiful, oh beautiful-
The April of the ages,
Which sweetly brought its showers of thought
To poets and to sages,
Now stored away our thirst to stay
In ever-dewy pages.

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