w. H. Auden

 

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

W. H. Auden

 Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Walt Whitman

 

From Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

 
We descend upon you and all things­­­­—we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality,
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions
                  and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers!

 
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate hence-
                  forward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves
                  from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you perma-
nently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you.
                       

William Shakespeare (1572-1631)

The Tempest

Prospero

“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,

And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.” 

18th century

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d” 

                                            Eloisa to Abelard

Alexander Pope

 

An Essay on Man: Epistle I

To Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of kings.

Let us (since life can little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die)

Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;

A mighty maze! but not without a plan;

A wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot;

Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

Together let us beat this ample field,

Try what the open, what the covert yield;

The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore

Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;

Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,

And catch the manners living as they rise;

Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;

But vindicate the ways of God to man.

Ben Johnson

“Still to be neat, still to be dressed”

Still to be neat, still to be dressed, 

As you were going to a feast; 

Still to be powdered, still perfumed; 

Lady, it is to be presumed, 

Though art's hid causes are not found, 

All is not sweet, all is not sound. 

Give me a look, give me a face, 

That makes simplicity a grace; 

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;

Such sweet neglect more taketh me 

                       Than all th'adulteries of art. 

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.