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قراءة كتاب The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3: Sorrow and Consolation
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
has sung to him and who sings to us. And when the bereaved has found God, he has found light in his darkness, peace in his tempest, a ray in his night.
"As a child, Whose song-bird seeks the wood forevermore,
Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth;
Till, sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,
He sleep the faster that he wept before."
The visitor to the island of Catalina, off the coast of California, is invited to go out in a glass-bottomed boat upon the sea. If he accepts the invitation and looks about him with careless curiosity, he will enjoy the blue of the summer sky and ocean wave, and the architectural beauty of the island hills; but if he turns his gaze downward and looks through the glass bottom of the boat in which he is sailing, he will discover manifold phases of beauty in the life beneath the sea waves: in goldfish darting hither and thither, in umbrella-shaped jellyfish lazily swimming by, in starfish and anemones of infinite variety, in sea-urchins brilliant in color, and in an endless forest of water-weeds exquisitely delicate in their structure. Perhaps he will try to photograph them; but in vain: his camera will render him no report of the wealth of life which he has seen. So he who takes up such a volume of poetry as this will find ample repayment in the successive pictures which it presents to his imagination, and the transient emotions which it will excite in him. But besides this there is a secret life which the careless reader will fail to see, and which the critic cannot report, but which will be revealed to the thoughtful, patient, meditative student. In this power to reveal an otherwise unknown world, lies the true glory of poetry. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the poet has to say to him.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW Frontispiece
Photogravure from photograph by Hanfstaengl after portrait by Kramer.
The patient grief and endurance of Absence: while the tapestry woven by day stands on the frame to be unravelled by night, as the loyal wife puts off her suitors.
Painting by Rudolph von Deutsch.
"What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?"
From a photograph by the Berlin Photographic Co., after a painting by R. Pötzelberger.
"Behold me, a god, what I endure from gods!
Behold, with throe on throe,
How, wasted by this woe,
I wrestle down the myriad years of Time!"
From photograph after a painting by G. Graeff.
From lithograph after a crayon-drawing by H. Alophe.
After an engraving from contemporary portrait.
After a photograph from life by Talfourd, London.
"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."
After an original drawing by Harry Fenn.
Death comes in,
Though Love, with outstretched arms and wings outspread,
Would bar the way."
From photogravure after the painting by George Fredeick Watts.
After a life-photograph by Rockwood, New York.
From an engraving after the drawing by George Richmond.
After a life-photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.
PENELOPE WAITING FOR ULYSSES
The patient grief and endurance of Absence: while the tapestry woven by day stands on the frame to be unravelled by night, as the loyal wife puts off her suitors.
Painting by Rudolph von Deutsch.
POEMS OF SORROW AND CONSOLATION.
I. DISAPPOINTMENT IN LOVE.
FROM "MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM," ACT I. SC. 1.
For aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth:
But, either it was different in blood,
Or else misgraffèd in respect of years,
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say,—Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
SHAKESPEARE.