Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: Oh, hear!

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than Thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip the skyey speed

Scarce seem'd a vision, I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need,
O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Make me thy lyre, ev'n as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

VII. The Sonnet

A sonnet is a short poem of fourteen lines, an octave and a sestet. The first eight lines give what is considered the body, and the remaining six lines, the soul, or the first eight lines might be considered the statement of proposition, and the remaining six lines the application. In some of Shakespeare's sonnets we find a deviation from the general proposition laid down by the poets, in which the proposition is made in the first twelve, and the application in the last two lines. The form is often compared with the sky-rocket-the last lines being the showering thoughts.

TO SCIENCE

Edgar Allen Poe.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
Shakespeare.

That you were once unkind befriends me now
And for that sorrow which I then did feel
Needs must I under my transgression bow,
Unless my nerves were brass or hammer'd steel.
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,
As I by yours, you've pass'd a hell of time;
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffer'd in your crime.
O, that our night of woe might have remember'd
My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,
And soon to you, as you to me, then tender'd
The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits!
But that your trespass now becomes a fee;
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.
Shakespeare.

VIII. The Ballad

The Ballad is one of the oldest forms of poetry. It was originally recited with music, and in all probability each chorus was a dance. The Ballad had its origin with the Italian, and it was several hundred years before the Ballad was introduced into England. It is a cousin to narrative

verse.

THE WEE WEE MAN

As I was wa'king all alane,

Between a water and a wa', There I spy'd a wee wee man,

And he was the least that e'er I saw.

His legs were scant a shathmont's length,
And sma' and limber was his thie,
Between his e'en there was a span,

And between his shoulders there was three.

He took up a meikle stane,

And he flang't as far as I could see; Though I had been a Wallace wight, I couldna liften't to my knee.

"O wee wee man, but thou be strang!
O tell me where thy dwelling be?”
"My dwelling's down at yon bonny bower;
O will you go with me and see?"

On we lap, and awa' we rade,

Till we cam' to yon bonny green; We lighted down for to bait our horse, And out there cam' a lady sheen.

Four and twenty at her back,

And they were a' clad out in green,

Though the King o' Scotland had been there, The warst o' them might hae been his Queen.

On we lap, and awa' we rade,

Till we cam' to yon bonny ha',

Where the roof was o' the beaten gowd,

And the floor was o' the crystal a'.

When we cam' to the stair foot,

Ladies were dancing, jimp and sma’;

But in the twinkling of an e'e,

My wee wee man was clean awa’.

IX. The Apostrophe

Apostrophe turns the mind away from animate to inanimate things, and the speaker talks to them as though they were animate; the dead as though living. For instance, the human being becomes discouraged with and disgusted at the ways and actions of his fellow-men, he turns to God's handiwork and creates in his own imagination, people out of trees, rocks, hills, valleys, and the great ocean; for in them and through them he finds a sympathy and a response which his fellow-men deny him. It is like the monologue, in some respects, and only differs in one way, that is, the monologue imagines the animate as an interlocutor and the apostrophe has the inanimate for its interlocutor. Therefore, in rendering the Apostrophe, it will be necessary to speak to this inanimate thing at some imagined particular place, and the speaker must for the time being, carry himself to this spot and speak to his inanimate friend oblivious of his surroundings. Some fine examples from the Bible:-King David, on hearing of the death of Absalom, exclaims: "O, my son Absalom, my son, my son!" Another apostrophe more extended, and equally beautiful, is the lament of David over the death of Jonathan. (2 Sam. 1: 21-27.)

THE OCEAN

Lord Byron.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.