From Chaucer to Tennyson · Chapter 29Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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[From The Ancient Mariner.]
Sometimes, a-dropping from the sky,
I heard the skylark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!
And now 'twas like all instruments,
And now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song
That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
[From the same.]
O wedding guest, this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:
So lonely 'twas that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company.
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men and babes and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay.
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou wedding guest;
He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
[From Christabel.]
Alas! they had been friends in youth
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above,
And life is thorny and youth is vain,
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it fared, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother;
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining.
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs that had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder
Can wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once has been.