No More Learning

Or that my tone should be
Tun'd to such solemn song
So mournfully--so mournfully,
That the dead may feel no wrong.

VI.

But she is gone above,
With young Hope at her side,
And I am drunk with love
Of the dead, who is my bride. --

VII.

Of the dead--dead who lies
All perfum'd there,
With the death upon her eyes,
And the life upon her hair.

VIII.

Thus on the coffin loud and long
I strike--the murmur sent
Through the grey chambers to my song,
Shall be the accompaniment.

IX.

Thou died'st in thy life's June--
But thou did'st not die too fair:
Thou did'st not die too soon,
Nor with too calm an air.

X.

From more than fiends on earth,
Thy life and love are riven,
To join the untainted mirth
Of more than thrones in heaven--

XII.

Therefore, to thee this night
I will no requiem raise,
But waft thee on thy flight,
With a Paean of old days.



NOTES

30. On the "Poems written in Youth" little comment is needed. This
section includes the pieces printed for first volume of 1827 (which was
subsequently suppressed), such poems from the first and second published
volumes of 1829 and 1831 as have not already been given in their revised
versions, and a few others collected from various sources.
"Al Aaraaf"
first appeared, with the sonnet "To Silence" prefixed to it, in 1829,
and is, substantially, as originally issued. In the edition for
1831, however, this poem, its author's longest, was introduced by the
following twenty-nine lines, which have been omitted in--all subsequent
collections:

AL AARAAF

Mysterious star!
Thou wert my dream
All a long summer night--
Be now my theme!
By this clear stream,
Of thee will I write;
Meantime from afar
Bathe me in light I

Thy world has not the dross of ours,
Yet all the beauty-all the flowers
That list our love or deck our bowers
In dreamy gardens, where do lie
Dreamy maidens all the day;
While the silver winds of Circassy
On violet couches faint away.
Little--oh "little dwells in thee"
Like unto what on earth we see:
Beauty's eye is here the bluest
In the falsest and untruest--On the sweetest
air doth float
The most sad and solemn note--

If with thee be broken hearts,
Joy so peacefully departs,
That its echo still doth dwell,
Like the murmur in the shell.
Thou! thy truest type of grief
Is the gently falling leaf!
Thy framing is so holy
Sorrow is not melancholy.

31. The earliest version of "Tamerlane" was included in the suppressed
volume of 1827, but differs very considerably from the poem as now
published. The present draft, besides innumerable verbal alterations and
improvements upon the original, is more carefully punctuated, and, the
lines being indented, presents a more pleasing appearance, to the eye at
least.

32. "To Helen" first appeared in the 1831 volume, as did also "The
Valley of Unrest" (as "The Valley Nis"), "Israfel," and one or two
others of the youthful pieces. The poem styled "Romance," constituted
the Preface of the 1829 volume, but with the addition of the following
lines:

Succeeding years, too wild for song,
Then rolled like tropic storms along,
Where, through the garish lights that fly
Dying along the troubled sky,
Lay bare, through vistas thunder-riven,
The blackness of the general Heaven,
That very blackness yet doth Ring
Light on the lightning's silver wing.

For being an idle boy lang syne;
Who read Anacreon and drank wine,
I early found Anacreon rhymes
Were almost passionate sometimes--
And by strange alchemy of brain
His pleasures always turned to pain--
His naivete to wild desire--
His wit to love-his wine to fire--
And so, being young and dipt in folly,
I fell in love with melancholy,

And used to throw my earthly rest
And quiet all away in jest--
I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty's breath--
Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny,
Were stalking between her and me.

*****

But now my soul hath too much room--
Gone are the glory and the gloom--
The black hath mellow'd into gray,
And all the fires are fading away.