Starving People, Droughts and Pestilence

John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919.
The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

John Keats. (1795–1821)

Ode to a Nightingale


MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,  5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades  75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?  80

Dylan Thomas -- Under Milk Wood

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. 

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and

the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack,

fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting,

velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the

shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town

are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler,

schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher,

policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their

dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood.

The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the

anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the

wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one

cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the

black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the

darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew

and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street

and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in

Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning, in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black,

butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah;

night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's

bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its

hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser,

watercolors done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of

babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the

graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged

night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and

basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures

of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and

mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big

seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

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