Wen Gott betrügt, ist wohl betrogen
Is it true, ye gods, who treat us
As the gambling fool is treated;
O ye, who ever cheat us,
And let us feel we’re cheated!
Is it true that poetical power,
The gift of heaven, the dower
Of Apollo and the Nine,
The inborn sense, ‘the vision and the faculty divine,’
All we glorify and bless
In our rapturous exaltation,
All invention, and creation,
Exuberance of fancy, and sublime imagination,
All a poet’s fame is built on,
The fame of Shakespeare, Milton,
Of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley,
Is in reason’s grave precision,
Nothing more, nothing less,
Than a peculiar conformation,
Constitution, and condition
Of the brain and of the belly?
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Cold Comfort
Say, will it, when our hairs are grey,
And wintry suns half light the day,
Which cheering hope and strengthening trust
Have left, departed, turned to dust,
Say, will it soothe lone years to extract
From fitful shows with sense exact
Their sad residuum, small, of fact?
Will trembling nerves their solace find
In plain conclusions of the mind?
Or errant fancies fond, that still
To fretful motions prompt the will,
Repose upon effect and cause,
And action of unvarying laws,
And human life’s familiar doom,
And on the all-concluding tomb.
Or were it to our kind and race,
And our instructed selves, disgrace
To wander then once more in you,
Green fields, beneath the pleasant blue;
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
To a Sleeping Child
Lips, lips, open!
Up comes a little bird that lives inside
Up comes a little bird, and peeps, and out he flies.
All the day he sits inside, and sometimes he sings,
Up he comes, and out he goes at night to spread his wings.
Little bird, little bird, whither will you go?
Round about the world, while nobody can know.
Little bird, little bird, whither do you flee?
Far away around the world, while nobody can see.
Little bird, little bird, how long will you roam?
All round the world and around again home;
Round the round world, and back through the air,
When the morning comes, the little bird is there.
Back comes the little bird and looks and in he flies,
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
There Is No God, the Wicked Sayeth
"There is no God," the wicked saith,
"And truly it's a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
It's better only guessing."
"There is no God," a youngster thinks,
"or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
Always to be a baby."
"There is no God, or if there is,"
The tradesman thinks, "'twere funny
If He should take it ill in me
To make a little money."
"Whether there be," the rich man says,
"It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
Are not in want of victual."
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Shadow and Light
Cease, empty Faith, the Spectrum saith,
I was, and lo, have been;
I, God, am nought: a shade of thought,
Which, but by darkness seen,
Upon the unknown yourselves have thrown,
Placed it and light between.
At morning’s birth on darkened earth,
And as the evening sinks,
Awfully vast abroad is cast
The lengthened form that shrinks
And shuns the sight in midday light,
And underneath you slinks.
From barren strands of wintry lands
Across the seas of time,
Borne onward fast ye touch at last
An equatorial clime;
In equatorial noon sublime
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Blessed are they that have not seen!
O happy they whose hearts receive
The implanted word with faith; believe
Because their fathers did before,
Because they learnt, and ask no more
High triumphs of convictions wrought,
And won by individual thought.
The joy, delusive oft, but keen,
Of having with our own eyes seen,
What if they have not felt nor known?
An amplitude instead they own,
By no self-binding ordinance prest
To toil in labour they detest:
By no deceiving reasoning tied
Or this or that way to decide.
O happy they! above their head
The glory of the unseen is spread;
Their happy heart is free to range
Thro’ largest tracts of pleasant change;
Their intellects encradled lie
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Through a Glass Darkly
What we, when face to face we see
The Father of our souls, shall be,
John tells us, doth not yet appear;
Ah! did he tell what we are here!
A mind for thoughts to pass into,
A heart for loves to travel through,
Five senses to detect things near,
Is this the whole that we are here?
Rules baffle instincts--instinct rules,
Wise men are bad--and good are fools,
Facts evil--wishes vain appear,
We cannot go, why are we here?
O may we for assurance's sake,
Some arbitrary judgement take,
And wilfully pronounce it clear,
For this or that 'tis we are here?
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Qua Cursum Ventus
AS ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze, 5
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:
E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?
At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered—
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Columbus
How in God's name did Columbus get over
Is a pure wonder to me, I protest,
Cabot, and Raleigh too, that well-read rover,
Frobisher, Dampier, Drake, and the rest.
Bad enough all the same,
For them that after came,
But, in great Heaven's name,
How he should ever think
That on the other brink
Of this wild waste terra firma should be,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
How a man ever should hope to get thither,
E'en if he knew that there was another side;
But to suppose he should come any whither,
Sailing straight on into chaos untried,
In spite of the motion
Across the whole ocean,
To stick to the notion
That in some nook or bend
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Qui Laborat, Orat
O only Source of all our light and life,
Whom as our truth, our strength, we see and feel,
But whom the hours of mortal moral strife
Alone aright reveal!
Mine inmost soul, before Thee inly brought,
Thy presence owns ineffable, divine;
Chastised each rebel self-encentered thought,
My will adoreth Thine.
With eye down-dropt, if then this earthly mind
Speechless remain, or speechless e’en depart;
Nor seek to see, for what of earthly kind
Can see Thee as Thou art?
If well-assured ’tis but profanely bold
In thought’s abstractest forms to seem to see,
It dare not dare the dread communion hold
In ways unworthy Thee,
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!