No More Learning

The nightingale, with long and low preamble,
Warbled from yonder knoll of solemn larches,
And in and out the woodbine's flowery arches
The summer midges wove their wanton gambol,
And all the white-stemmed pinewood slept above--
When in this valley first I told my love.




XXIX

=Sonnet=

[Published in _Friendships Offering: a Literary Album_ for 1832.
London: Smith and Elder. ]

Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh:
Thy woes are birds of passage, transitory:
Thy spirit, circled with a living glory,
In summer still a summer joy resumeth.
Alone my hopeless melancholy gloometh,
Like a lone cypress, through the twilight hoary,
From an old garden where no flower bloometh,
One cypress on an inland promontory.
But yet my lonely spirit follows thine,
As round the rolling earth night follows day:
But yet thy lights on my horizon shine
Into my night when thou art far away;
I am so dark, alas! and thou so bright,
When we two meet there's never perfect light.




XXX

=Sonnet=

[Published in the _Yorkshire Literary Annual_ for 1832. Edited by C. F.
Edgar, London: Longman and Co. Reprinted in the _Athenaeum_, 4 May,
1867. ]

There are three things that fill my heart with sighs
And steep my soul in laughter (when I view
Fair maiden forms moving like melodies),
Dimples, roselips, and eyes of any hue.

There are three things beneath the blessed skies
For which I live--black eyes, and brown and blue;
I hold them all most dear; but oh! black eyes,
I live and die, and only die for you.
Of late such eyes looked at me--while I mused
At sunset, underneath a shadowy plane
In old Bayona, nigh the Southern Sea--
From an half-open lattice looked at _me_.

I saw no more only those eyes--confused
And dazzled to the heart with glorious pain.




=Poems, 1833=


[The poems numbered XXXI-XXXIX were published in the 1832 volume
(_Poems by Alfred Tennyson_. London: Edward Moxon, 94 New Bond Street.
MDCCCXXXIII; published December, 1832), and were thereafter
suppressed. ]




XXXI

=Sonnet=

Oh, Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet!
How canst thou let me waste my youth in sighs;
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes,
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee--scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek.
Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control
Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat
The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,
The bare word KISS hath made my inner soul
To tremble like a lutestring, ere the note
Hath melted in the silence that it broke.




XXXII

=The Hesperides=

Hesperus and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree.
--COMUS.

The Northwind fall'n, in the newstarred night
Zidonian Hanno, voyaging beyond
The hoary promontory of Soloe
Past Thymiaterion, in calmed bays,
Between the Southern and the Western Horn,
Heard neither warbling of the nightingale,
Nor melody o' the Lybian lotusflute
Blown seaward from the shore; but from a slope
That ran bloombright into the Atlantic blue,
Beneath a highland leaning down a weight
Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedarshade,
Came voices, like the voices in a dream,
Continuous till he reached the other sea.