London and Oxford: Three Sonnets

LIKE bodiless water passing in a sigh,
Thro’ palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun and all the sky ;
The towery acres sink upon the eye
As if they heard the Hebrew bugles blow,
Sullen and black; nor could the founders know
How what was built so bright could daily die.

Thy heart with man’s is broken and blent in,
City of Stains ! and ache of thought doth drown
The natural light in which thy life began :
Great as thy dole is, smirchëd with our sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor ’s down.

THRO’ rosy cloud and over thorny towers,
Their wings with all the autumn distance filled,
From Isis’ valley border hundred-hilled
The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers.
For their coequal session and for ours
By battled walls did lovely Wykeham build
These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,
These dearest inland melancholy bowers.

Blest birds ! A book held open on the knee
Below is all they know of Adam’s blight.
With surer art the while, and simpler rite,
They live and learn in some monastic tree,
Where breathe against their innocent breasts by night
The scholar’s star, the star of sanctity.

THABOR of England ! since my light is short
And faint, oh, rather by the sun anew
Of timeless passion set my dial true,
That with thy saints and thee I may consort,
And wafted in the calm Chaucerian port
Of poets, seem a little sail long due,
And be as one the song of memory drew
Unto the saddle void since Agincourt!

Not now for secular love’s unquiet lease
Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile
Hath broken tryst with transitory things ;
But seal with her a marriage and a peace
Eternal on thine Edward’s holy isle,
Above the stormy sea of ended kings.