Page:Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918.djvu/880

 LORD TENNYSON

For surely now our household hearths are cold:

Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:

And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.

Or else the island princes over-bold

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings

Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,

And our great deeds, as half -forgotten things.

Is there confusion in the little isle?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile:

'Tis hard to settle order- once again.

There confusion worse than death,

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

But propt on beds of amaranth and moly,

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)

With half-dropt eyelids still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly

His waters from the purple hill

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro 5 die thick-twined vine

To watch the emerald-colour 'd water falling

Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak: The Lotos blows by every winding creek. All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:

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