word that is the poet's wand! The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes Are for Thought's purest gold the jewel-stones; But shapes and echoes that are never done Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones The crash of battles that are never won. 

  

       Verlaine     

      Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers To touch the covered corpse of him that fled The uplands for the fens, and rioted Like a sick satyr with doom's worshippers? Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse To tell the story of the life he led. Let the man go:  let the dead flesh be dead, And let the worms be its biographers. Song sloughs away the sin to find redress In art's complete remembrance:  nothing clings For long but laurel to the stricken brow That felt the Muse's finger; nothing less Than hell's fulfilment of the end of things Can blot the star that shines on Paris now. 

  

       Sonnet     

      When we can all so excellently give The measure of love's wisdom with a blow, —      Why can we not in turn receive it so, And end this murmur for the life we live? And when we do so frantically strive To win strange faith, why do we shun to know That in love's elemental over-glow God's wholeness gleams with light superlative? Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all, Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, —      Or anything God ever made that grows, —      Nor let the smallest vision of it slip, Till you can read, as on Belshazzar's wall, The glory of eternal partnership! 

  

       Supremacy     

      There is a drear and lonely tract of hell From all the common gloom removed afar:      A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are, Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell. I walked among them and I knew them well:      Men I had slandered on life's little star For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar Upon their brows of woe ineffable. But as I went majestic on my way, Into the dark they vanished, one by one, Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day, The dream of all my glory was undone, —      And, with a fool's importunate dismay, I heard the dead men singing in the sun. 

  

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