FRAGMENTS FROM A VOLUME OF POEMS
Reading edition
BY THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.
[Just Published in London.]
NOTHING ALONE.
All round and through the spaces of creation No hiding-place of the least air, or earth, Or sea, invisible, untrod, unrained on, Contains a thing alone. Not e'en the bird, That can go up the labyrinthine winds Between its pinions, and pursues the summer,— Not even the great serpent of the billows, Who winds him thrice around this planet's waist,— Is by itself in joy or suffering.
LOVE.
O that sweet influence of thoughts and looks! That change of being, which, to one who lives, Is nothing less divine than divine life To the unmade! Love? Do I love? I walk Within the brilliance of another's thought, As in a glory.
INNOCENT WELCOME TO EVIL.
How thou art like the daisy in Noah's meadow, On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm And soft at evening; so the little flower Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water Close to the golden welcome of its breast,— Delighting in the touch of that which led The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops Tritons and lions of the sea were warring.
THE IMPARTIAL BANQUET.
The unfashionable worm, Respectless of crown-illumined brow, To cheek's bewitchment, or the sceptred clench, With no more eyes than Love, creeps courtier-like, On his thin belly, to his food,—no matter How clad or nicknamed it might strut above, What age or sex,—it is his dinner-time.
ARGUMENT FOR MERCY.
I have a plea, As dewy piteous as the gentle ghost's That sits alone upon a forest-grave Thinking of no revenge: I have a mandate, As magical and potent as e'er ran Silently through a battle's myriad veins, Undid their fingers from the hanging steel, And drew them up in prayer: I am a woman. O motherly-remembered be the name, And, with the thought of loves and sisters, sweet And comforting!
INTERCESSION BETWEEN A FATHER AND A SON.
There stands before you The youth and golden top of your existence, Another life of yours: for, think your morning Not lost, but given, passed from your hand to his The same except in place. Be then to him As was the former tenant of your age, When you were in the prologue of your time, And he lay hid in you unconsciously Under his life. And thou, my younger master, Remember there's a kind of God in him; And, after heaven, the next of thy religion. Thy second fears of God, thy first of man, Are his, who was creation's delegate, And made this world for thee in making thee.