No More Learning

Oh, to what uses shall we put
The wildweed-flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut
Within the bosom of the rose?


2

But any man that walks the mead,
In bud or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead,
A meaning suited to his mind.
And liberal applications lie
In Art like Nature, dearest friend; [1]
So 'twere to cramp its use, if I
Should hook it to some useful end.


[Foonote 1: So Wordsworth:--

O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in everything.

--'Simon Lee'. ]








L'ENVOI


(No alteration since 1843 except in numbering the stanzas. )

1

You shake your head. A random string
Your finer female sense offends.
Well--were it not a pleasant thing
To fall asleep with all one's friends;
To pass with all our social ties
To silence from the paths of men;
And every hundred years to rise
And learn the world, and sleep again;
To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars,
And wake on science grown to more,
On secrets of the brain, the stars,
As wild as aught of fairy lore;
And all that else the years will show,
The Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,
The Federations and the Powers;
Titanic forces taking birth
In divers seasons, divers climes;
For we are Ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.


2

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep
Thro' sunny decads new and strange,
Or gay quinquenniads would we reap
The flower and quintessence of change.


3

Ah, yet would I--and would I might!
So much your eyes my fancy take--
Be still the first to leap to light
That I might kiss those eyes awake!
For, am I right or am I wrong,
To choose your own you did not care;
You'd have 'my' moral from the song,
And I will take my pleasure there:
And, am I right or am I wrong,
My fancy, ranging thro' and thro',
To search a meaning for the song,
Perforce will still revert to you;
Nor finds a closer truth than this
All-graceful head, so richly curl'd,
And evermore a costly kiss
The prelude to some brighter world.



4

For since the time when Adam first
Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
And every bird of Eden burst
In carol, every bud to flower,
What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes?
What lips, like thine, so sweetly join'd?
Where on the double rosebud droops
The fullness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved, [1]
Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,
That lets thee [2] neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
And in the rights that name may give,
Are clasp'd the moral of thy life,
And that for which I care to live.


[Foonote 1: 1842. The pensive mind that, self-involved. ]

[Foonote 2: 1842. Which lets thee. ]



EPILOGUE


(No alteration since 1842. )

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,
And, if you find a meaning there,
O whisper to your glass, and say,
"What wonder, if he thinks me fair? "
What wonder I was all unwise,
To shape the song for your delight
Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise,
That float thro' Heaven, and cannot light?
Or old-world trains, upheld at court
By Cupid-boys of blooming hue--
But take it--earnest wed with sport,
And either sacred unto you.







AMPHION


First published in 1842. No alteration since 1850.

In this humorous allegory the poet bewails his unhappy lot on having
fallen on an age so unpropitious to poetry, contrasting it with the
happy times so responsive to his predecessors who piped to a world
prepared to dance to their music.