
"The Vatican Rag"
That Was the Year That Was (1965)
Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650)
"The Vatican Rag"
That Was the Year That Was (1965)
“Oh bed! oh bed! delicious bed!
That heaven upon earth to the weary head.”
Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg. Her Dream http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/eop_hood_poetical_works_4.htm#146, st. 7.
1840s
“Euryalus
In death went reeling down,
And blood streamed on his handsome length, his neck
Collapsing let his head fall on his shoulder—
As a bright flower cut by a passing plow
Will droop and wither slowly, or a poppy
Bow its head upon its tired stalk
When overborne by a passing rain.”
Volvitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus
It cruor inque umeros cervix conlapsa recumbit:
Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
Languescit moriens; lassove papavera collo
Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur.
Compare:
Μήκων δ' ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ' ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ' ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν.
He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm's weight.
Homer, Iliad, VIII, 306–308 (tr. R. Lattimore)
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IX, Lines 433–437 (tr. Fitzgerald)
Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 81–82. (47.)
The Lord of Misrule
The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems (1915)
The Soldier's Funeral from The London Literary Gazette (16th November 1822)
The Improvisatrice (1824)
“The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.”
"Missionary Hymn", st. 2 (1819).
Hymns
Who Has Seen the Wind? http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=1191, st. 2 (1872).
The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899), The Man With the Hoe (1898)
Context: Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes.
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?