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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Our sons inherit us,? our looks are strange, succeed us as our heirs And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes2 overbold 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 is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labor unto aged breath, Sore tasks to hearts worn out by many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.
7
But, propped on beds of amaranth and moly,3
How sweet?while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly?
With half-dropped eyelid 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 through the thick-twined vine?
To watch the emerald-colored water falling
Through many a woven acanthus4 wreath divine!
Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,
Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.
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The Lotos blooms below the barren peak,
The Lotos blows by every winding creek;
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone;
Through every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos land to live and be reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts0 are hurled thunderbolts
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world;
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
