1871 EDWARD LEAR

	There was an old man who screamed out
	Whenever they knocked him about;
	So they took off his boots, And fed him with fruits,
	And continued to knock him about.

EDWARD LEAR The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

	I
	The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
	In a beautiful pea-green boat,
	They took some honey, and plenty of money,
	Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
	The Owl looked up to the stars above,
	And sang to a small guitar,
	‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
	What a beautiful Pussy you are,
	You are,
	You are!
	What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

	II
	Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
	How charmingly sweet you sing!
	O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
	But what shall we do for a ring?’
	They sailed away, for a year and a day,
	To the land where the Bong-tree grows
	And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
	With a ring at the end of his nose,
	His nose,
	His nose,
	With a ring at the end of his nose.

	III
	‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
	Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
	So they took it away, and were married next day
	By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
	They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
	Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
	And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
	They danced by the light of the moon,
	The moon,
	The moon,
	They danced by the light of the moon.

LEWIS CARROLL from Through the Looking-Glass 1872

	‘The piece I’m going to repeat’, he went on without noticing her remark, ‘was written entirely for your amusement.’
	Alice felt that in that case she really ought to listen to it; so she sat down, and said ‘Thank you’ rather sadly,

	‘In winter, when the fields are white,
	I sing this song for your delight –

	only I don’t sing it,’ he added, as an explanation.
	‘I see you don’t,’ said Alice.
	‘If you can see whether I’m singing or not, you’ve sharper eyes than most,’ Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent.

	‘In spring, when woods are getting green,
	I’ll try and tell you what I mean:’
	‘Thank you very much,’ said Alice.

	‘In summer, when the days are long,
	Perhaps you’ll understand the song:

	In autumn, when the leaves are brown,
	Take pen and ink, and write it down.’

	‘I will, if I can remember it so long,’ said Alice.
	‘You needn’t go on making remarks like that,’ Humpty Dumpty said: ‘they’re not sensible, and they put me out.’

	‘I sent a message to the fish:
	I told them “This is what I wish.”

	The little fishes of the sea,
	They sent an answer back to me.

	The little fishes’ answer was
	“We cannot do it, Sir, because –” ’

	‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ said Alice.
	‘It gets easier further on,’ Humpty Dumpty replied.

	‘I sent to them again to say
	“It will be better to obey”.

	The fishes answered, with a grin,
	“Why, what a temper you are in!”

	I told them once, I told them twice:
	They would not listen to advice.

	I took a kettle large and new,
	Fit for the deed I had to do.

	My heart went hop, my heart went thump:
	I filled the kettle at the pump.

	Then some one came to me and said
	“The little fishes are in bed.”

	I said to him, I said it plain,
	“Then you must wake them up again.”

	I said it very loud and clear:
	I went and shouted in his ear.’

Humpty Dumpty raised his voice almost to a scream as he repeated this verse, and Alice thought, with a shudder, ‘I wouldn’t have been the messenger for anything!’

	‘But he was very stiff and proud:
	He said, “You needn’t shout so loud!”

	And he was very proud and stiff:
	He said “I’d go and wake them, if –”

	I took a corkscrew from the shelf:
	I went to wake them up myself.

	And when I found the door was locked,
	I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

	And when I found the door was shut,
	I tried to turn the handle, but –’

	There was a long pause.
	‘Is that all?’ Alice timidly asked.
	‘That’s all,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘Good-bye.’

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI from Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book

	Dead in the cold, a song-singing thrush,
	Dead at the foot of a snowberry bush, –
	Weave him a coffin of rush,
	Dig him a grave where the soft mosses grow,
	Raise him a tombstone of snow.

*

	A city plum is not a plum;
	A dumb-bell is no bell, though dumb;
	A party rat is not a rat;
	A sailor’s cat is not a cat;
	A soldier’s frog is not a frog;
	A captain’s log is not a log.

*

	If a pig wore a wig,
	What could we say?
	Treat him as a gentleman,
	And say ‘Good-day.’

	If his tail chanced to fail,
	What could we do? –
	Send him to the tailoress
	To get one new.

*

	I caught a little ladybird
	That flies far away;
	I caught a little lady wife
	That is both staid and gay.

	Come back, my scarlet ladybird,
	Back from far away;
	I weary of my dolly wife,
	My wife that cannot play.

	She’s such a senseless wooden thing
	She stares the livelong day;
	Her wig of gold is stiff and cold
	And cannot change to grey.

ROBERT BROWNING [Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of ‘The Judgement of Paris’]

	He gazed and gazed and gazed and gazed,
	Amazed, amazed, amazed, amazed.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI By the Sea 1875

	Why does the sea moan evermore?
	Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,
	It frets against the boundary shore;
	All earth’s full rivers cannot fill
	The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

	Sheer miracles of loveliness
	Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:
	Anemones, salt, passionless,
	Blow flower-like; just enough alive
	To blow and multiply and thrive.

	Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,
	Encrusted live things argus-eyed,
	All fair alike, yet all unlike,
	Are born without a pang, and die
	Without a pang, and so pass by.

COVENTRY PATMORE Magna est Veritas 1877

	Here, in this little Bay,
	Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
	Where, twice a day,
	The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
	Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
	I sit me down.
	For want of me the world’s course will not fail:
	When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
	The truth is great, and shall prevail,
	When none cares whether it prevail or not.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS The Windhover:

	To Christ our Lord
	I caught this morning morning’s minion, king
	dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
	Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
	High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
	In his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing,
	As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
	Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
	Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

	Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
	Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
	Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

	No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
	Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
	Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

(1918)

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Pied Beauty

	Glory be to God for dappled things –
	For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
	For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
	Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
	Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
	And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
	All things counter, original, spare, strange;
	Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
	With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
	He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
	Praise him.

(1918)

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS from The Wreck of the Deutschland

	To the
	happy memory of five Franciscan nuns
	exiles by the Falck Laws
	drowned between midnight and morning of
	Dec. 7th, 1875

	PART THE FIRST
	Thou mastering me
	God! giver of breath and bread;
	World’s strand, sway of the sea;
	Lord of living and dead;
	Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
	And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
	Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
	Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

	I did say yes
	0 at lightning and lashed rod;
	Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
	Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
	Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
	The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
	Hard down with a horror of height:
	And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

	The frown of his face
	Before me, the hurtle of hell
	Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
	I whirled out wings that spell
	And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
	My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
	Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
	To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

	I am soft sift
	In an hourglass – at the wall
	Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
	And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
	I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
	But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
	Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
	Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

	I kiss my hand
	To the stars, lovely-asunder
	Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
	Glow, glory in thunder;
	Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
	Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
	His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
	For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

	Not out of his bliss
	Springs the stress felt
	Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
	Swings the stroke dealt –
	Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
	That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt –
	But it rides time like riding a river
	(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

	It dates from day
	Of his going in Galilee;
	Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
	Manger, maiden’s knee;
	The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat:
	Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,
	Though felt before, though in high flood yet –
	What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

	Is out with it! Oh,
	We lash with the best or worst
	Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
	Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
	Gush! – flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,
	Brim, in a flash, full! – Hither then, last or first,
	To hero of Calvary, Christ,’s feet –
	Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it – men go.

	Be adored among men,
	God, three-numbered form;
	Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
	Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.
	Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
	Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
	Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
	Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

	With an anvil-ding
	And with fire in him forge thy will
	Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
	Through him, melt him but master him still:
	Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
	Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill,
	Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
	Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

(1918)

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE A Forsaken Garden 1878

	In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
	At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
	Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
	The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
	A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
	The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
	Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
	Now lie dead.

	The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
	To the low last edge of the long lone land.
	If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
	Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?
	So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
	Through branches and briars if a man make way,
	He shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless
	Night and day.

	The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
	That crawls by a track none turn to climb
	To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
	Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
	The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
	The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
	The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
	These remain.

	Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
	As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
	From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
	Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
	Over the meadows that blossom and wither
	Rings but the note of a sea-bird’s song;
	Only the sun and the rain come hither
	All year long.

	The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
	One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
	Only the wind here hovers and revels
	In a round where life seems barren as death.
	Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
	Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
	Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
	Years ago.

	Heart handfast in heart as they stood, ‘Look thither’,
	Did he whisper? ‘look forth from the flowers to the sea;
	For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
	And men that love lightly may die – but we?’
	And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
	And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
	In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
	Love was dead.

	Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
	And were one to the end – but what end who knows?
	Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
	As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
	Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
	What love was ever as deep as a grave?
	They are loveless now as the grass above them
	Or the wave.

	All are at one now, roses and lovers.
	Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
	Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
	In the air now soft with a summer to be.
	Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
	Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
	When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
	We shall sleep.

	Here death may deal not again for ever:
	Here change may come not till all change end.
	From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
	Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
	Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing.
	While the sun and the rain live, these shall be:
	Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing
	Roll the sea.

	Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
	Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
	Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
	The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
	Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
	Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
	As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
	Death lies dead.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE A Vision of Spring in Winter

	O tender time that love thinks long to see,
	Sweet foot of spring that with her footfall sows
	Late snowlike flowery leavings of the snows,
	Be not too long irresolute to be;
	O mother-month, where have they hidden thee?
	Out of the pale time of the flowerless rose
	I reach my heart out toward the springtime lands,
	I stretch my spirit forth to the fair hours,
	The purplest of the prime:
	I lean my soul down over them, with hands
	Made wide to take the ghostly growths of flowers:
	I send my love back to the lovely time.

	Where has the greenwood hid thy gracious head?
	Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves,
	Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves,
	What warm intangible green shadows spread
	To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed?
	What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives?
	Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn
	Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet
	Its silver web unweave,
	Thy footless ghost on some unfooted lawn
	Whose air the unrisen sunbeams fear to fret
	Lives a ghost’s life of daylong dawn and eve.

	Sunrise it sees not, neither set of star,
	Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune,
	Nor strong sweet shape of the full-breasted noon;
	But where the silver-sandalled shadows are,
	Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar,
	Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon:
	Hard overhead the half-lit crescent swims,
	The tender-coloured night draws hardly breath,
	The light is listening;
	They watch the dawn of slender-shapen limbs,
	Virginal, born again of doubtful death,
	Chill foster-father of the weanling spring.

	As sweet desire of day before the day,
	As dreams of love before the true love born,
	From the outer edge of winter overworn
	The ghost arisen of May before the May
	Takes through dim air her unawakened way,
	The gracious ghost of morning risen ere morn.
	With little unblown breasts and child-eyed looks
	Following, the very maid, the girl-child spring,
	Lifts windward her bright brows,
	Dips her light feet in warm and moving brooks,
	And kindles with her own mouth’s colouring
	The fearful firstlings of the plumeless boughs.

	I seek thee sleeping, and awhile I see,
	Fair face that art not, how thy maiden breath
	Shall put at last the deadly days to death
	And fill the fields and fire the woods with thee
	And seaward hollows where my feet would be
	When heaven shall hear the word that April saith
	To change the cold heart of the weary time,
	To stir and soften all the time to tears,
	Tears joyfuller than mirth;
	As even to May’s clear height the young days climb
	With feet not swifter than those fair first years
	Whose flowers revive not with thy flowers on earth.

	I would not bid thee, though I might, give back
	One good thing youth has given and borne away;
	I crave not any comfort of the day
	That is not, nor on time’s retrodden track
	Would turn to meet the white-robed hours or black
	That long since left me on their mortal way;
	Nor light nor love that has been, nor the breath
	That comes with morning from the sun to be
	And sets light hope on fire;
	No fruit, no flower thought once too fair for death,
	No flower nor hour once fallen from life’s green tree,
	No leaf once plucked or once fulfilled desire.

	The morning song beneath the stars that fled
	With twilight through the moonless mountain air,
	While youth with burning lips and wreathless hair
	Sang toward the sun that was to crown his head,
	Rising; the hopes that triumphed and fell dead,
	The sweet swift eyes and songs of hours that were;
	These may’st thou not give back for ever; these,
	As at the sea’s heart all her wrecks lie waste,
	Lie deeper than the sea;
	But flowers thou may’st, and winds, and hours of ease,
	And all its April to the world thou may’st
	Give back, and half my April back to me.

1880 ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON Rizpah

	17–
	Wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea –
	And Willy’s voice in the wind, ‘O mother, come out to me.’
	Why should he call me tonight, when he knows that I cannot go?
	For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at the snow.

	We should be seen, my dear; they would spy us out of the town.
	The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the down,
	When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of the chain,
	And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched with the rain.

	Anything fallen again? nay – what was there left to fall?
	I have taken them home, I have numbered the bones, I have hidden them all.
	What am I saying? and what are you? do you come as a spy?
	Falls? what falls? who knows? As the tree falls so must it lie.

	Who let her in? how long has she been? you – what have you heard?
	Why did you sit so quiet? you never have spoken a word.
	O – to pray with me – yes – a lady – none of their spies –
	But the night has crept into my heart, and begun to darken my eyes.

	Ah – you, that have lived so soft, what should you know of the night,
	The blast and the burning shame and the bitter frost and the fright?
	I have done it, while you were asleep – you were only made for the day.
	I have gathered my baby together – and now you may go your way.

	Nay – for it’s kind of you, Madam, to sit by an old dying wife.
	But say nothing hard of my boy, I have only an hour of life.
	I kissed my boy in the prison, before he went out to die.
	‘They dared me to do it,’ he said, and he never has told me a lie.
	I whipt him for robbing an orchard once when he was but a child –
	‘The farmer dared me to do it,’ he said; he was always so wild –
	And idle – and couldn’t be idle – my Willy – he never could rest.
	The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been one of his best.

	But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be good;
	They swore that he dare not rob the mail, and he swore that he would;
	And he took no life, but he took one purse, and when all was done
	He flung it among his fellows – I’ll none of it, said my son.

	I came into court to the Judge and the lawyers. I told them my tale,
	God’s own truth – but they killed him, they killed him for robbing the mail.
	They hanged him in chains for a show – we had always borne a good name –
	To be hanged for a thief – and then put away – isn’t that enough shame?
	Dust to dust – low down – let us hide! but they set him so high
	That all the ships of the world could stare at him, passing by.
	God ’ill pardon the hell-black raven and horrible fowls of the air,
	But not the black heart of the lawyer who killed him and hanged him there.

	And the jailer forced me away. I had bid him my last goodbye;
	They had fastened the door of his cell. ‘O mother!’ I heard him cry.
	I couldn’t get back though I tried, he had something further to say,
	And now I never shall know it. The jailer forced me away.

	Then since I couldn’t but hear that cry of my boy that was dead,
	They seized me and shut me up: they fastened me down on my bed.
	‘Mother, O mother!’ – he called in the dark to me year after year –
	They beat me for that, they beat me – you know that I couldn’t but hear;
	And then at the last they found I had grown so stupid and still
	They let me abroad again – but the creatures had worked their will.

	Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left –
	I stole them all from the lawyers – and you, will you call it a theft? –
	My baby, the bones that had sucked me, the bones that had laughed and had cried –
	Theirs? O no! they are mine – not theirs – they had moved in my side.

	Do you think I was scared by the bones? I kissed ’em, I buried ’em all –
	I can’t dig deep, I am old – in the night by the churchyard wall.
	My Willy ’ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment ’ill sound,
	But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground.

	They would scratch him up – they would hang him again on the cursed tree.
	Sin? O yes – we are sinners, I know – let all that be,
	And read me a Bible verse of the Lord’s good will toward men –
	‘Full of compassion and mercy, the Lord’ – let me hear it again;
	‘Full of compassion and mercy – long-suffering.’ Yes, O yes!
	For the lawyer is born but to murder – the Saviour lives but to bless.
	He’ll never put on the black cap except for the worst of the worst,
	And the first may be last – I have heard it in church – and the last may be first.
	Suffering – O long-suffering – yes, as the Lord must know,
	Year after year in the mist and the wind and the shower and the snow.

	Heard, have you? what? they have told you he never repented his sin.
	How do they know it? are they his mother? are you of his kin?
	Heard! have you ever heard, when the storm on the downs began,
	The wind that ’ill wail like a child and the sea that ’ill moan like a man?

	Election, Election and Reprobation – it’s all very well.
	But I go tonight to my boy, and I shall not find him in Hell.
	For I cared so much for my boy that the Lord has looked into my care,
	And He means me I’m sure to be happy with Willy, I know not where.

	And if he be lost – but to save my soul that is all your desire:
	Do you think that I care for my soul if my boy be gone to the fire?
	I have been with God in the dark – go, go, you may leave me alone –
	You never have borne a child – you are just as hard as a stone.

	Madam, I beg your pardon! I think that you mean to be kind,
	But I cannot hear what you say for my Willy’s voice in the wind –
	The snow and the sky so bright – he used but to call in the dark,
	And he calls to me now from the church and not from the gibbet for hark!
	Nay – you can hear it yourself – it is coming – shaking the walls –
	Willy – the moon’s in a cloud – Good-night. I am going. He calls.

CHARLES TURNER Letty’s Globe

	When Letty had scarce pass’d her third glad year,
	And her young, artless words began to flow,
	One day we gave the child a colour’d sphere
	Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
	By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
	She patted all the world; old empires peep’d
	Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
	Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap’d,
	And laugh’d, and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
	But when we turned her sweet unlearned eye
	On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry,
	‘Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!’
	And, while she hid all England with a kiss,
	Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.

JOSEPH SKIPSEY ‘GetUp!’ 1881

	‘Get up!’ the caller calls, ‘Get up!’
	And in the dead of night,
	To win the bairns their bite and sup,
	I rise a weary wight.

	My flannel dudden donn’d, thrice o’er
	My birds are kiss’d, and then
	I with a whistle shut the door,
	I may not ope again.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ‘Summer is Ended’

	To think that this meaningless thing was ever a rose,
	Scentless, colourless, this!
	Will it ever be thus (who knows?)
	Thus with our bliss,
	If we wait till the close?

	Tho’ we care not to wait for the end, there comes the end
	Sooner, later, at last,
	Which nothing can mar, nothing mend:
	An end locked fast,
	Bent we cannot re-bend.