Books like Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for youAs yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,But am betroth’d unto your enemy;Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for I,Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,As once Electra her sepulchral urn,And, looking in thine eyes, I overturnThe ashes at thy feet. Behold and seeWhat a great heap of grief lay hid in me,And how the red wild sparkles dimly burnThrough the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scornCould tread them out to darkness utterly,It might be well perhaps. But if insteadThou wait beside me for the wind to blowThe grey dust up—those laurels on thine head,O my Beloved, will not shield thee so,That none of all the fires shall scorch and shredThe hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.

Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.

Wind whines and whines the shingle,The crazy pierstakes groan;A senile sea numbers each singleSlimesilvered stone.From whining wind and colderGrey sea I wrap him warmAnd touch his trembling fineboned shoulderAnd boyish arm.Around us fear, descendingDarkness of fear aboveAnd in my heart how deep unendingAche of love!

A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me. My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy. Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love. Is not this first irruption of the most intense feeling a man can know a very strange thing? I had met some pretty women in my aunt’s drawing-room; they had not made the slightest impression on me. Is there an hour, a conjunction of the stars, a combination of fitting circumstances, a particular woman above all other women, which seal a passion as exclusive at the age when passion includes the whole female sex?

She never told her love,But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,And with a green and yellow melancholyShe sat like patience on a monument,Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?We men may say more, swear more: but indeedOur shows are more than will; for still we proveMuch in our vows, but little in our love.