Watching The Birth of a Nation Today

for the memory of Daniel Krogh who taught me about film sixty years ago


Now, when so many Americans are looking at American racism and rising in righteous protest, it is useful seek to understand the history of white supremacy in this country and why it has been so persistent in spite of its false and destructive nature. Viewing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation provides a view of the centrality of racism in the United States and the shell-game dodges by which some ordinary people may be convinced of its lies.

There is no doubt that D. W. Griffith is a master of film, not only for his fundamental contribution to the visual vocabulary of the medium, but for his creative shaping of the norms of popular culture in his narratives and characters. The vicious racism of The Birth of a Nation is so undisguised as to be likewise undebatable.

The film dazzled viewers when it came out in 1915 to great fanfare and a series of special premieres in various cities with substantial ticket prices, a thirteen-page program, and a storeful of other souvenirs. It was over three hours long not counting the intermission, with a grand orchestral score and no end of hype. It remained the highest-grossing film well into the sound era, until another fable of Southern history -- Gone with the Wind -- was released in 1939.

The publicity prominently featured the apparent endorsement of the federal government. President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected president since 1848, the man who resegregated federal agencies, is quoted in the film’s titles in praise of “a great Ku Klux Klan . . . to protect the Southern country.” [1] Wilson invited Griffith and Thomas Dixon, Jr. who had written The Clansman, the popular novel and play from which the film was made, to show the movie in the White House. It was then exhibited to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice Edward Douglas White proudly recalled his own Klan membership. This showing was also attended by cabinet ministers, almost a hundred members of Congress, and other high government officials.

The propaganda value of Griffith’s version of history was evident. Dixon bragged to the president, “This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy.” [2] The pernicious effect of The Birth of a Nation led to the formation of the Lost Cause defense of the Confederacy, most obvious in the rebirth of the Klan itself which had become moribund but which surged after William Joseph Simmons viewed the film and decided to reorganize the terrorist group, designating himself as Imperial Wizard. In this new incarnation the Klan became hugely successful, gaining many members in the Midwest and the North and committing acts of violence and vigilantism while presenting itself as a benevolent patriotic fraternal organization.

Griffith, the son of a Confederate colonel, was doubtless pleased at his reactionary role. Yet there are significant signs that he felt uneasy about the hatred he was inspiring. The film anticipates controversy, opening with “a plea for the art of the motion picture” against censorship and associating the new art form with literature, the Bible and Shakespeare. Another title card states disingenuously that the story is purely historical and not meant to characterize any race or group in contemporary American society.

He strove as well to displace the true theme by claiming in another title that the work’s theme is not race but actually “the ravages of war.” At the end grand allegorical scenes depict a suffering humanity below a mounted war deity succeeded by Christ presiding over a peaceful utopia, “a golden day when bestial war shall rule no more.”

Griffith took pains to insist that the skewed fantasy of his film was nothing but the historical facts. A number of titles note his research into history books and photographs to make his scenes completely authentic, and in interviews he justified one incident after another by pointing to what he claimed to be their factual basis. Nor was he singular in his depiction of the period. A similar view of Reconstruction was advanced by many academic historians, perhaps the most influential of whom was William Archibald Dunning at Columbia.

The film emphasizes the peculiar fascination with sexuality that lies at the root of American racial attitudes. Gus, the wicked “renegade” pursues Flora, the sweet little sister who plunges over a cliff to her death rather than submit to his embraces, and then the “mulatto” Silas Lynch tries to force himself on Elsie Stoneman. One cannot avoid thinking of the trumped-up rape accusations that often were the excuse for lynching, and the sexual mutilation of victims. Even a rumor or hint of forward behavior might trigger violence as the case of Emmet Till.

At the end of the film the Klansmen ride triumphantly into town with the young Cameron and Stoneman women at the head of the column. Griffith defended his movie as "an influence against the intermarriage of blacks and whites"; indeed, he claimed in a letter to the New York Times that he had made the movie "for one reason only—because it opposes the marriage of blacks to whites and whites.” He ridiculed the NAACP as "the Negro Intermarriage Society." [4] This irrational obsession with racial purity (in spite of the mixing through rape and sexual coercion) was so psychologically powerful that in 1967 when the Supreme Court ended the miscegenation laws sixteen states still outlawed interracial marriage.

Thus, a racist system that aims in fact at maintaining power and economic advantage of one group over another masquerades as a moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan reinforced this identity by supporting the cause of Prohibition and sometimes directing vigilante action against those thought to be immoral: loose women, unfaithful husbands, gamblers, and wife-beaters, some of them white. Tyranny and reaction has always tried to claim the moral high ground. One may think of Nixon’s attempt to characterize protesters as drug-users or common reactions to early AIDS activists. The continuing success of such tactics is evident in the strong evangelical support for right wing policies that in fact violate Christian principles.

The Birth of a Nation is quaint in many ways. Quite a few of Griffith’s Klansmen seem to be wearing toilet plungers on their heads instead of the better-known pointy dunce cap hoods. Though real African-Americans appear in crowd scenes, Griffith used white actors in crude makeup to play leading Black roles, causing the faithful Cameron servants to appear as grotesquely ridiculous as his villain Gus. Whereas in minstrelsy blackface was associated with comedy and light-hearted good times, here it seems explicitly ugly and sinister. The broad and artificial language of gesture of pre-cinematic stage actors is as dated as the stylized melodramatic plot line.

Like Leni Riefenstahl’s work, Griffith’s film will always be studied by students of cinema, but it deserves attention as well from those who despise its hateful theme but wish to investigate the foundations and the supporting myths of American racism. As always the artist is the one who records attitudes with the most precise detail and the strongest passion. In writing Sexual Politics, Kate Millet examined not feminist authors but D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, knowing that their works contained the clearest statement of the codes that enable patriarchy.

The viewer can appreciate the epic grandeur of the crowd scenes and applaud Griffith’s exploitation of the medium in new ways, pioneering close-ups, fade-outs, tracking shots, parallel action sequences, crosscutting and a host of other innovations. (The iris shots and tinting of certain sequences will please fewer today.) Yet one cannot forget for a moment the sinister deceitful message the great director meant to bring to America, a mission in which he succeeded all too well. The current demonstrations indicate what little progress has occurred in the last century.



1. Other quotations from Wilson’s The History of the American People included in the film are these. “The Policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.…in their determination to "put the white South under the heel of the black South.” "Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile, and use the Negroes.…In the villages the Negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.”

Griffith did not use all Wilson’s racist comments by any means. This, for example, is in the book but not the film: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”

2. Letter quoted in John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, 20-21.

3. How odd that he should have been given that name.

4. These quotations are available by looking no further than the Wikipedia article on The Birth of a Nation. Original citations are available there.

Tristan’s World

This view of Tristan was written after I recently read the great romance in A. F. Hatto’s Penguin translation. Many years ago in graduate school I had slogged through the text in MHG. I cannot bring myself even now either to discard or to reread the voluminous notes I made at that time, but these comments make no scholarly pretense. I do not claim familiarity with the critical literature either, but this approach is, so far as I know, new. Parenthetical numbers refer to the Hatto paperback.

The study of literature I think would be enriched if more common readers were to record their reactions. Scholars might suggest ideas outside their areas of expertise. I suspect that even professors could learn a few things from non-specialists. Alas, I am afraid that no one today could make a living writing about literature as Edmund Wilson did without a university appointment.


     Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan is in part a hero in the old style: peerless physically, able to win every competition or single combat, a potent fighter in war. Yet he is far more an Odysseus than an Achilles, and his expertise at artifice is evinced by his cunning, trickery, and disguise, but also by his chivalry, elegance, and good taste. Tristan appears as a mysterious trickster, a shape-shifter, almost but not quite able to transform the tragic reality into which he is born. Tristan assumes disguises as a merchant’s son and as Tantris the minstrel, just as his mother Blancheflor had disguised herself to gain access to his father Rivalin. While the somewhat similar figure of Melville’s Confidence-Man plays hide-and-seek with the reader and remains wholly elusive in spite of the solid reality of the river boat, Tristan is wholly engaged in human suffering. Rather like Jesus, but lacking the promise of restorative justice after death, Tristan, a courtly elitist, a refined connoisseur among heroes, achieves his end through a love-death after enduring to the utmost the most ordinary of passions: love-longing, frustration, and mortality.
     The hero’s end, misled into thinking that his beloved is not arriving, affirms the sadness his name suggests while underlining the central motif of signs improperly interpreted, of counterfeit and genuine, deceptive and truthful, generating a scintillating play of appearance and reality. Different readings of Tristan are then unsurprising. One might read the epic as a post-modern spectacle with participants identifying themselves with conventions or ironic tropes on conventions to pass the time like Estragon and Vladimir though in Gottfried the setting may be a palace or a field of war and in Tristan a great deal happens, though the events generally seem governed by chance and guess-work and error. For all the sententiae dealt out here and there, Gottfried seems a profoundly skeptical man.
     The story itself is decentered. Unlike many authors of fiction until well into the nineteenth century, Gottfried does not claim that the story is true, only that it is of the sort that can uplift and entertain “noble hearts.” He notes the multiplicity of versions and promises to provide the very best using Thomas as his principal source, and, indeed, he does not wander far from his predecessor in the narrative. At various points in the telling, he emphasizes his own deviations from others who had told Tristan’s story. Beginning with an invented story current in many variations, he gives then his own reworking of what he considers to be the best of its past storytellers. It is a free play of fiction, governed by taste.
     Again and again along the way Gottfried stresses ambiguity and ambivalence. Tristan is above all else a lover. Yet a glance at the beginning and end of the narrative suggests that this status is dubious. His affair with Isolde begins only with the external chance of their accidental consumption of the love philtre. Then, at the end, Isolde’s double, Isolde of the White Hands, causes him to reflect. “Tristan was in two minds about whether he wanted Isolde or not . . .’Do I desire her or don’t I,’ he was constantly asking himself. ‘I think I do not, and then I think I do.’” (294) He marries the new Isolde, but does not make love to her and finally Tristan dies after she misinforms about the sail indicating the arrival of the Irish Isolde. His amatory career is thus muddied by chance, uncertainty, and lies, none of which affected his martial prowess.
     He realizes the inadequacy of language and declares “I do not know how to begin.” (108) He proceeds only after imagining a prayer to Apollo and the Muses and throughout the poem frequently pauses in self-reflection, commenting on his authorial decisions, asking himself such questions as “What fresh matters will I now set in train?” (121)
     In his prologue Gottfried sets forth his dialectical program, saying that, though his goal is distraction and entertainment to soothe the burden of life, his story is not for the many who value pleasure alone but for a more sophisticated audience that appreciates the “bittersweet.” (42) The hypnotic couplet of the prologue is a meditation on duality as much as an announcement of the author’s topic.


A man, a woman; a woman, a man;
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.


     He goes to say “Their life, their death is our bread” (44) Surely this means not only that his contemporaries could relish the story but also that such polarities define our everyday reality. The realization that such oppositions as joy and pain, male and female, truth and lie form the fabric of the human experience is transformative. Thus Tristan’s father Rivalin in his passion for Blancheflor not only learns that love is sadness; this insight so affects him that it “changed his whole cast of mind.” He “became quite a different man, since all that he did was chequered with strangeness and blindness.” (53)
     Even Christianity provides no reliable truth in Gottfried’s world. In one of the most-discussed figures of the story, Gottfried declares, upon Isolde’s success in the ordeal of hot iron that Christ is “pliant as a wind-blown sleeve.” (248) There could hardly be a more powerful statement of the uncertainty in which people live than to claim that Christ, in Christian ideology the central focus and bedrock of reality, is no more stable than a passing breeze. Indeed through the story Christ is consistently assumed to take the part of love with little regard for the church’s traditional moral doctrine.
     The oscillation between possibilities is evident in the hero’s identity and disguise, in the multiple versions of the story, in the limitations of language itself, in emotions, even in the divine. In this story in which the heroic knight is a trickster and an artist, valor is assumed and refined taste is the criterion of value. Yet Tristan must function in a world of disguises, misinterpreted signs, and contradictions. Whereas some have regarded Gottfried as the founder of a religion of love, it seems more accurate to say that he portrays a world of chance, ungovernable compulsion, and impenetrable obscurity in which one must, like Tristan, blindly grope forward until the end without the benefit of revelation. Along the way is magnificent pageantry, beauty, pleasure, and constant hazard into which our hero has no nobler choice then to throw himself fully into the game, rather like an existential “man of action,” and we, the readers, pass our time by following along as the hero makes his way in the “darkling plain.”

Every Reader's Keats

This is the thirteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In the Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

The poems discussed follow the essay.


     I hesitate to write about John Keats, for to me he is like a youthful romance, somewhat embarrassing while inspiring what I still experience late in life as ingenuous heart-felt affection. Keats, more than any other single writer, attracted me to poetry with his dedication to beauty, his clearly cut concrete imagery, and his lovely melodies.

     His appeal may have been enhanced by his biography, an exemplary Romantic life. Born to parents of modest circumstances – his father had tended horses in a stable attached to an inn which he later rose to manage, but he died when the author was eight. His mother sent him to school where he acquired the reputation of being a bit wild, indolent, and prone to fist-fights, but it was there that he attained a love of Classics (though not a scholar’s expertise) and a dedication to literature, winning an academic prize at the age of thirteen. The following year his mother died and he was sent to live with his grandmother who promptly apprenticed him to the family’s medical practitioner. Successfully completing the apprenticeship, Keats went to something like a residency in London well on his way to qualifying for the Royal College of Surgeons. Yet the more he wrote and entered into a literary scene, the more he resented the time he had to devote to medicine; he ultimately abandoned that work for the dubious career of a full-time poet.

     “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is perhaps the best-known sonnet from Keats’ earliest collection, but to me a little-praised piece provides a clearer model of the poet’s sensibility. The sonnet beginning “Give me a golden pen . . .” was an occasional impromptu written in a matter of minutes toward the conclusion of a social visit. It is nothing but a series of images, each if which renders more precise the subjective experience. Keats begins with the pen, as memorializing the pleasant hours in verse fixes their memory and enables their lasting significance. The pen is golden because of the value of such preserved felicity, the adjective suggesting as well the gap between real and ideal which for Keats only art can bridge. With characteristic extravagance Keats then imagines himself leaning “on heaped-up flowers.” The experience, while sublimed by aesthetic distance (“in regions clear, and far”), sounds almost hedonistic in glad sensuality. The poet proposes beginning with “a tablet whiter than a star,” a vision of the absolute immediately succeeded by a series of concrete images, a more palpable version of the beauty Keats experiences as semi-divine. Having asked for a “tablet” on which to write, he moves to a different art, his poetry now figured as the heavenly music of the blessed. For Keats the mention of celestial song is too vague, he renders the idea photographic, specifying the angelic hand at a particular moment, “the silver strings of heavenly harp atween,” and then goes on to add “a pearly car,” and then “pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar.” Just as he is only just trying his artistic abilities, the presumably newly minted angel has “half-discovered wings.”

     He is then able not only to hear the music of the spheres, but to transcribe a part on his page. Amazed at the sublimity he has attained he exclaims, “For what a height my spirit is contending!” just before the final line reminds the reader that this extraordinary afflatus has been attained simply by passing the evening among sympathetic friends. His reliance on his fancy, and his idealistic aspiration toward the sublime are clear and enthusiastic, and his method of reasoning through images already established.

     A similar pattern is discernable in “Sleep and Poetry” in which, after repeating the familiar sentiment “life is but a day,” Keats proceeds also to identify life with “A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way/ From a tree’s summit” and then, even more extravagantly to “a poor Indian’s sleep/ While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep/ Of Montmorenci.” This fatalistic description is then immediately succeeded by more positive images: “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” “the reading of an ever-changing tale,” “the light uplifting of a maiden’s veil,” and “a pigeon tumbling in the summer air.” He then concludes the series with an altogether optimistic figure “a laughing school-boy, without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.” Note however, that the burden of mortality is never denied, the rose, the story, the maiden, the pigeon, even the “laughing school-boy” each must come to an end, and Keats was acutely aware that he, too, shared that fate toward which one may cultivate an enlightened acceptance, but which one cannot escape.


     Keats’ odes are likely his best-known works, and of them surely the popular favorite is his meditation on a Greek vase of the sort that fills many little-visited galleries in the great museums of Athens and Paris and New York. The ode had evolved in English literature into a far more flexible form than it had in antiquity. (Pindar possesses sufficient complexity that a reader might think he is “free-styling,” to use an almost contemporary idiom.) Keats here devised an original form though he used a traditional name which to him signified strong emotion and a certain looseness of structure.

     The poem is an ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of art. He begins writing not about the pictured scene as much as about his lack of knowledge of what is before his eyes. What does the scene represent, he asks, who are represented, what is going on?

     One might be tempted to reduce the poem to the neat concluding apothegm.


"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."


     While this may seem to declare an unconflicted aestheticism, wholly satisfied by the rapt contemplation of an objet d’art, such a reading would ignore the balancing complaint that runs through the poem, a lament about mortality and the transience of things, painful facts that lead the poet to seek solace in the art of antiquity. Ancient Greece, fetishized in Europe since the Renaissance, was particularly valued by the Romantics (many neo-Classical writers having a taste for Rome), and Keats hopes to escape the terms of human existence, what Marvell called “the iron gates of life,” by contemplation of the clay object. The boughs are “happy,” because they exist outside of time. Of course, their happiness is a construction of the human observer as is their beauty.

     The survival of a beautiful work of art promises a sort of immortality, though at the price that it remain a perpetually “unravish’d bride,” a “cold Pastoral,” while those who appreciate it weep and laugh and celebrate and sicken and die. The poem may, in fact, be said to be about the gap between the feeling, desiring, temporally limited subject and the perfect, timeless object. This opposition, present from the start never develops or changes; there can be no honest resolution. The questions of the first stanza return unchanged in the fourth, while stanzas two and three praise the incorruptible perfection of the scene. What Keats appreciates on the vase the love, the “mad pursuit” and “wild ecstasy” are the very things which in human life he seeks to transcend: the “heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,” the burning forehead” and “parching tongue” all of which evidence strong emotion.

     Keats’ ode “To Autumn” represents another attempt to come to terms with the evanescence of beauty. While springtime is a common theme since the earliest poetry, the autumn, he rightly suggests, is comparatively unappreciated. He invokes no eternal work of art, but rather celebrates the fullness, the perfection of the full maturation of the harvest season, followed though it is by the death of annuals and the chill of winter. In a lush elaboration of Shakespeare’s formula from King Lear “Ripeness is all” Keats details the country scene. The first stanza notes the beauty of the season’s fruit and nuts and suggests people’s joy at collecting this bounty, surely a strong emotion since prehistoric times, but the second stanza is decidedly more Romantic, almost decadent.

     Autumn is personified as a languid, dreamy, “careless,” “half asleep,” as though “drows'd with the fume of poppies,” and the theme of soporific intoxication is echoed by the mention of the “cyder-press.” This suggestion of anaesthesia allows the observer, perhaps, to feel satisfaction in the moment like the bees who “think warm days will never cease,” and to ignore the inevitability of approaching death and barrenness.

     Yet the final stanza defines the music of the season first in the “wailful choir the small gnats” mourning and rising among the “sallows,” or willows that grow by the river. Willows are a common gravestone motif, but the next image, the bleating lambs, is less funereal, and the lambs are succeeded by the sound of the crickets, the robins, and the swallows. The poem ends with this chorus asserting the value of life despite the shortening days. In nature, of course, the cycle continues, the new will replace the old, assuring a sort of immortality, while the individual human subject will come to an end.

     Keats developed a passionate attachment to Fanny Brawne to whom he wrote "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. . .Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you." He reworked a sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” he had composed earlier to express his love.

     Again, his focus is the gap between the temporal and the eternal absolute he identifies with her and likens to a star. The first eight lines, the octave, portray her as “stedfast,” “eternal,” “unchangeable,” gazing passively over earth, in fact, not unlike the “Grecian urn.” He can participate in this divinity through his love. “Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,” he can feel himself “awake for ever in a sweet unrest.” In this condition of aroused passion he feels in part at least redeemed. If he must die, it will be in a “swoon” of love at which the lover could hardly complain.

     Keats’ literary career was frustrated by low sales – the four volumes published during the poet’s lifetime sold less than a few hundred copies. Apart from the praise of Leigh Hunt and other friends, the critical attention his work attracted was fierce and scathing, more political and social than literary. Keats and his circle were condemned as the “Cockney school” of poetry. The poet had asked that his epitaph be simply “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” but his friends added a protest against his treatment by critics which they maintained contributed to his death. “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies.”

     Keats remains a poet to whom I can return repeatedly for his lovely melodies and pregnantly suggestive images. In a certain mood I find Shelley is often airy and abstract, Wordsworth plain in language though sometimes tangled in meaning, Coleridge philosophical, and Byron casual and hasty. While, readers may perceive Keats’ weaknesses, I for one have a prejudice in his favor. In a letter he defined “Negative Capability” as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is in art that meaning may be constructed without revelation or positivism. Keats, whose life was difficult in a number of ways, managed to build an imaginative world true to his experience yet lit with joy.




Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heaped-up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
And let there glide by many a pearly car
Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
And half-discovered wings, and glances keen.
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres:
For what a height my spirit is contending!
'Tis not content so soon to be alone.




Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."




To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.