Life and Existence

The ripest peach is highest on the tree.

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave, I was a King in Babylon And you were a Christian Slave.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

As dust that drives, as straws that blow, Into the night go one and all.

What have you done, you there Weeping without cease, Tell me, yes you, what have you done With all your youth? 3

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

World-mothering air, air wild, Wound with thee, in thee isled, Fold home, fast fold thy child.

How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty… from vanishing away?

I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?

It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? My duty all ended, Who have watched his mold of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome, Pining, pining.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Glory be to God for dappled things.

Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

To men a man is but a mind. Who cares What face he carries or what form he wears? But woman’s body is the woman. O Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their chiseled names the raindrop plows.

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment Day.