O May I Join the Choir Invisible! | Page 3

If we have not a son?
Ah! ah! ah! when Gaeta's taken, what then?
When the fair, wicked queen sits no more at her sport
Of the fire-balls
of death crashing souls out of men?
When your guns of Cavalli, with final retort,
Have cut the game short--
When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee,
When your flag takes all Heaven for its white, green, and red, When
_you_ have your country from mountain to sea,
When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head,
(And I have my dead)
What then? Do not mock me! Ah, ring your bells low!

And burn your lights faintly. _My_ country is there,
Above the star
pricked by the last peak of snow.
_My_ Italy's there--with my brave civic Pair,
To disfranchise despair.
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn,
But the birth-pangs
of nations will wring us at length
Into wail such as this! and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.
Dead! one of them shot by the sea in the west!
And one of them shot in the east by the sea!
Both! both my boys! If,
in keeping the feast,
You want a great song for your Italy free,
Let none look at _me_!
NATURE'S LADY.
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A
lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will
take,
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me

The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,

Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn

Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,


And hers the silence and the calm,
Of mute insensate things.
{She shall be sportive as the fawn: p3.jpg}
"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willows
bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm

Grace that shall mould the maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."
TO A SKYLARK.
Hail to thee, blithe spirit--
Bird thou never wert--
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring
ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds art bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just
begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,

In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill
delight--
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel, that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is
overflowed.
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow-clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of
melody:--
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded
not;
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love which overflows her
bower;
Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the
view;
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much heat these
heavy-winged thieves;
{Thou art unseen, but yet I hear they shrill delight: p4.jpg}
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers--
All that ever was
Joyous and clear and fresh--thy music doth surpass.
Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus hymeneal,
Or triumphal chaunt,
Matched with thine, would be all
But an empty vaunt--
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden
want.
What objects are the fountains
Of the happy strain?
What fields, or waves or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what

ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and