Uses
AH, from the niggard tree of Time
How quickly fall the hours!
It needs no touch of wind or rime
To loose such facile flowers.
Drift of the dead year's harvesting,
They clog to-morrow's way,
Yet serve to shelter growths of Spring
Beneath their warm decay.
Or, blent by pious hands with rare
Sweet savors of content,
Surprise the soul's December air
With June's forgotten scent.
poem by Edith Wharton
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A Meeting
On a sheer peak of joy we meet;
Below us hums the abyss;
Death either way allures our feet
If we take one step amiss.
One moment let us drink the blue
Transcendent air together—
Then down where the same old work’s to do
In the same dull daily weather.
We may not wait . . . yet look below!
How part? On this keen ridge
But one may pass. They call you—go!
My life shall be your bridg.
poem by Edith Wharton
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Jade
THE patient craftsman of the East who made
His undulant dragons of the veined jade,
And wound their sinuous volutes round the whole
Pellucid green redundance of the bowl,
Chiseled his subtle traceries with the same
Keen stone he wrought them in.
Nor praise, nor blame,
Nor gifts the years relinquish or refuse,
But only a grief commensurate with thy soul,
Shall carve it in a shape for gods to use.
poem by Edith Wharton
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La Vierge Au Donateur
Here by the ample river’s argent sweep,
Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls,
A tower-crowned Cybele in armoured sleep
The city lies, fat plenty in her halls,
With calm parochial spires that hold in fee
The friendly gables clustered at their base,
And, equipoised o’er tower and market-place,
The Gothic minister’s winged immensity;
And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood,
Two placid hearts, to all life’s good resigned,
Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find
Long years of peace and dreamless plenitude.
poem by Edith Wharton
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Mona Lisa
Yon strange blue city crowns a scarped steep
No mortal foot hath bloodlessly essayed:
Dreams and illusions beacon from its keep.
But at the gate an Angel bares his blade;
And tales are told of those who thought to gain
At dawn its ramparts; but when evening fell
Far off they saw each fading pinnacle
Lit with wild lightnings from the heaven of pain;
Yet there two souls, whom life’s perversities
Had mocked with want in plenty, tears in mirth,
Might meet in dreams, ungarmented of earth,
And drain Joy’s awful chalice to the lees.
poem by Edith Wharton
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A Failure
(She Speaks.)
I MEANT to be so strong and true!
The world may smile and question, When?
But what I might have been to you
I cannot be to other men.
Just one in twenty to the rest,
And all in all to you alone, -
This was my dream; perchance 'tis best
That this, like other dreams, is flown.
For you I should have been so kind,
So prompt my spirit to control,
To win fresh vigor for my mind,
And purer beauties for my soul;
Beneath your eye I might have grown
To that divine, ideal height,
Which, mating wholly with your own,
[...] Read more
poem by Edith Wharton
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Euryalus
UPWARD we went by fields of asphodel,
Leaving Ortygia's moat-bound walls below;
By orchards, where the wind-flowers' drifted snow
Lay lightly heaped upon the turf's light swell;
By gardens, whence upon the wayside fell
Jasmine and rose in April's overflow;
Till, winding up in Epipolae's wide brow,
We reached at last the lonely citadel.
There, on the ruined rampart climbing high,
We sat and dreamed among the browsing sheep,
Until we heard the trumpet's startled cry
Waking a clang of arms about the keep,
And seaward saw, with rapt foreboding eye,
The sails of Athens whiten on the deep.
poem by Edith Wharton
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Happiness
THIS perfect love can find no words to say.
What words are left, still sacred for our use,
That have not suffered the sad world's abuse,
And figure forth a gladness dimmed and gray?
Let us be silent still, since words convey
But shadowed images, wherein we lose
The fulness of love's light; our lips refuse
The fluent commonplace of yesterday.
Then shall we hear beneath the brooding wing
Of silence what abiding voices sleep,
The primal notes of nature, that outring
Man's little noises, warble he or weep,
The song the morning stars together sing,
The sound of deep that calleth unto deep.
poem by Edith Wharton
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The Eumenides
Think you we slept within the Delphic bower,
What time our victim sought Apollo’s grace?
Nay, drawn into ourselves, in that deep place
Where good and evil meet, we bode our hour.
For not inexorable is our power.
And we are hunted of the prey we chase,
Soonest gain ground on them that flee apace,
And draw temerity from hearts that cower.
Shuddering we gather in the house of ruth,
And on the fearful turn a face of fear,
But they to whom the ways of doom are clear
Not vainly named us the Eumenides.
Our feet are faithful in the paths of truth,
And in the constant heart we house at peace.
poem by Edith Wharton
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Mould and Vase [GREEK POTTERY OF AREZZO.]
HERE in the jealous hollow of the mould,
Faint, light-eluding, as templed in the breast
Of some rose-vaulted lotus, see the best
The artist had - the vision that unrolled
Its flying sequence till completion's hold
Caught the wild round and bade the dancers rest -
The mortal lip on the immortal pressed
One instant, ere the blindness and the cold.
And there the vase: immobile, exiled, tame,
The captives of fulfillment link their round,
Foot-heavy on the inelastic ground,
How different, yet how enviously the same!
Dishonoring the kinship that they claim,
As here the written word the inner sound.
poem by Edith Wharton
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