Sidney Lanier Poems

For ever wave, for ever float and shine
Before my yearning eyes, oh! dream of mine
Wherein I dreamed that time was like a vine,

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Thou God, whose high, eternal Love
Is the only blue sky of our life,
Clear all the Heaven that bends above
The life-road of this man and wife.
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Light rain-drops fall and wrinkle the sea,
Then vanish, and die utterly.
One would not know that rain-drops fell
If the round sea-wrinkles did not tell.
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My crippled sense fares bow'd along
His uncompanioned way,
And wronged by death pays life with wrong
And I wake by night and dream by day.
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Written for the Art Autograph during the Irish Famine, 1880.



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I knowed a man, which he lived in Jones,
Which Jones is a county of red hills and stones,
And he lived pretty much by gittin' of loans,
And his mules was nuthin' but skin and bones,
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In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know
Two springs that with unbroken flow
Forever pour their lucent streams
Into my soul's far Lake of Dreams.
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Hey, rose, just born
Twin to a thorn;
Was't so with you, O Love and Scorn?
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Down mildest shores of milk-white sand,
By cape and fair Floridian bay,
Twixt billowy pines -- a surf asleep on land --
And the great Gulf at play,
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From the German of Herder.



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