DLTK's Poems
Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the
moon lies fair
Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast,
out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the
moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles
which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high
strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous
cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
Into
his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in
the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of
the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So
various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor
light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are
here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
