Catullus’ Currency of Kisses: New translations of Catullus V, VII, and XLVIII

 

 The Latin texts of the poems are appended.

 

 

     Erotic relationships seem sometimes, to some lovers, reducible to the rules of accountancy: a bit of pleasure in return for a certain amount of trouble, a financial cost balanced against flights of delight.  When upbraiding Ameana for an excessive fee (41) or complaining of Aulifilena’s deception (110), Catullus displays the confident misogyny of a substantial citizen in a patriarchy.

     Yet with passionate attachments, the values shift dramatically.  One lover’s side, at least, of the exchange can balloon to virtually infinite value which may or may not be equaled by the love object.  Catullus expresses the degree of romantic love by a figure of speech, as innumerable kisses. [1]  The association of love and kisses is natural, of course, but, when the kisses become uncountable, the image signifies the power of eros.  Such lover’s desperation may lead either to love-sickness, depression, and the miserable conviction that one has been playing the fool or, for the more fortunate, to an ascent to Elysium. 

     In Catullus XLVIII the convention appears at its simplest in the context of gay relationship. 

 

Your honeyed eyes, Juventius,

if I could kiss them on and on,

three hundred thousand times would not

suffice.  I’d never have enough,

not if they numbered more than grains

could grow in fields of one estate.

 

     A hyperbolic compliment, but one fully intended in passionate moods, the hundreds of thousands of kisses remain still insufficient to express the lover’s emotion.  He cannot rest in languorous pleasure, but always wants more.  Love is measured by a currency of kisses, and the quantity must be countless to indicate the ineffable magnitude of the love. 

     The association here, first with honey and then with ears of cereal grain reinforces this indefinite and enthusiastic measure of love, and links the poem to archaic practices designed to foster fertility, human, animal, and vegetable alike. [2]  If, as Frazer reported, people would copulate in their fields in hopes of a good harvest, holding one’s lover may remain, in a vestigial way, a ritual of sympathetic magic to renew the world.  Such a link has at least an emotional reality, recorded in all the poems of spring’s regreening accompanying the blossoming of romance. 

     Catullus VII first extends the hyperbole, with an elaborate series of references at first geographical, then historic and cosmic. 

 

How many, Lesbia, kisses between us,

might be enough to surfeit me and more?

As many as the grains of Libyan sand

that lie in Cyrene where the silphium grows,

between the oracle of torrid Jove

and Battus’ old and holy sepulchre,

as many as the stars in silent night

that see all peoples’ secret love affairs.

So many kisses must the mad Catullus have

to be enough and then some, too,

so that the curious can never count

nor any tongue cast evil words our way.

 

This lyric reinforces the kisses’ meaning familiar from XLVIII and expandss it with concrete specifics, while also adding considerable semantic territory.  Extravagant love, measurable only by countless kisses, is associated with the exotic (Cyrene), the rare and precious (silphium or asafoetida), the sensual (“torrid”), and yet the venerable (the grave of the city’s founder) and indeed the universally human (“peoples’ secret love affairs”). 

     Rich in content if lacking the straightforward and spontaneous-seeming apparent speaking from the heart of XLVIII this poem suddenly turns in the final two lines to reveal a new aspect of the lovers’ situation.  Whereas the original referent of the currency of kisses had been erotic intensity, here they provide a mystical protection from hostile busybodies very like the “jealous ones” of Troubadour lyric over a millennium later.  As a subjective experience of the lovers from which all others are excluded, the kisses create a private utopian world, protected against all threats by the power of their affection.  These ill-wishers are the projection of the lovers’ fear that their bliss is endangered and perhaps cannot last.

     In V, likely the most familiar Catullan carmina, the motif of countless kisses is employed in service of the carpe diem topos.  Here it spotlights the contrast between the couple’s delirium of love-making and those disapproving superannuated meddlers. 

 

Oh, let us live, my Lesbia, let us love!

And any idle talk of crabbed old men

we’ll value at one pennyworth, no more.

The sun, we know, will set and rise again,

and yet, for us, when our brief light is gone,

what follows then will be an endless sleep. 

A thousand kisses and a hundred more I want,

another thousand, and a hundred yet,

and when the thousands upon thousands mount,

we’ll stir the pot and then we’ll never know

and those who envy us won’t know as well

how many kisses you and I enjoyed.

 

The seventh through the tenth lines simply juggle numbers, indicating the ineffable quality of a necessarily private erotic experience.  Like a jazz singer going into scatting the artist best approximates the joy of love by admitting its inexpressibility.  The two are so confidently in control that they, as though with a wave of a magic wand, can fling the scene into confusion and frustrate the hostile intentions of the envious while enjoying the marvels of each other’s bodies.   

     Catullus’ lyrics portray a range of lovers, some selfish, some selfless.  For him erotic play was could be simple recreation without emotional engagement, but other verses suggest a whole-hearted tumble into total commitment scarcely expressible in words.  Adopting the apparently natural association of love and kisses, he elaborates the imagery of a currency of kisses to signify a passion so great as to require a figure of speech, so great it may provide an apotropaic charm against the invidious. 

     A master of invective and insult and capable of plain-speaking to the point of outright vulgarity, Catullus was at the same time a virtuoso of love poetry whose elegant and original language might be either ardent or nasty.  His range is evident in another poem using the multitude of kisses topos.  In his most notorious poem (XVI) he complains that Aurelius and Furius have mistaken his romantic side for weakness, and the very image under discussion is to blame.   “Because I write of countless kisses, you think me as less a man?” Catullus defends his masculinity with the purest sexual aggression “I will fuck your ass and mouth”. [3]  That this verse is written by the same author who wrote as a devotee of true love only suggests the breadth and variety of the wild territory of eros. 

 

 

 

1.  Among others who use the same image is Baudelaire who in “Le Balcon” exclaims “ô baisers infinis!”

 

2.  Leah O’Hearn demonstrates the details of the implications of honey and of grain, particularly the latter’s association with the emergence of facial hair in Classical love poetry.   See “Title: Juventius and the Summer of Youth in Catullus 48,” Mnemosyne LXXIV, 1.

 

3.  “Vōs, quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum, lēgistis male mē marem putātis?” and (“Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō”. 

 

 

 

 

 

XLVII

Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,

siquis me sinat usque basiare,

usque ad milia basiem trecenta,

nec unquam videar satur futurus,

non si densior aridis aristis

sit nostrae seges osculationis.

 

 

VII

Quaeris, quot mihi bāsiātiōnēs

tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.

Quam magnus numerus Libyssae harēnae

lasarpīciferīs iacet Cyrēnīs

ōrāclum Iovis inter aestuōsī

et Battī veteris sacrum sepulcrum;

aut quam sīdera multa, cum tacet nōx,

fūrtīvōs hominum vident amōrēs:

tam tē bāsia multa bāsiāre

vēsānō satis et super Catullō est,

quae nec pernumerāre cūriōsī

possint nec mala fascināre lingua.

 

 

V

Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

High Peaks of European Cuisine

 

     Growing up in a Midwestern suburb during the Eisenhower era, I came to feel that I lived in a cultural desert.  Not realizing then that everyone’s own culture tends to be invisible to the individual, I thought not only Chicago’s nearby Black neighborhoods, but also small Midwestern towns, not to mention every other country on earth, had more to engage the imagination than the trimmed lawns of my neighborhood where the height of aesthetic ambition seemed embodied in my parents’ artificial Christmas tree situated in the picture window and played upon by varicolored lights as it revolved.  The corresponding cuisine notoriously depended on ketchup, margarine, Wonder Bread, Jell-O salads, and casseroles using canned soups.  On the rare occasions that my family dined out, it was either for burgers or, for a fancy meal, steak or fried chicken.

     But I soon learned that other options existed and, in menus as in other matters, I became a dissenter.  My mother learned early that I preferred Oscar Mayer Smokey Links to hot dogs and Liederkranz to Velveeta and, as I reached high school age, I found access to lamb and eggplant from Diana’s on South Halsted, sausage with mumbo sauce from a stand beneath the 63^rd Street El, and pickled cabbage from the Assyrian-American Restaurant.  Now, of course, ethnic holes-in-the-wall are everyone’s favorites and salsa is America’s most popular condiment.  A combination of world travels and stacks of library cookbooks have given me some familiarity with what is done with food today.  I have learned that no other region produces such a grand variety of pickled foods as the Korean banchan, while Indian cooking excels in the harmonious orchestration of large numbers of aromatic herbs and spices.  At the same time, I came to reconsider white people’s food and to realize that the European continent has dramatically high peaks of its own culinary achievement.  Though I took a long way round, I had come to be able to appreciate the unique triumphs of white people’s cooking.    

     Bread is made in a good many parts of the world, but European wheat breads have been developed to a level of sophistication far outpacing other regions.  Most of the world’s breads are unleavened flatbreads like tortillas or chapattis, sometimes, like Ethiopian injera, fermented.  In the nineteenth century the first satisfactory chemical leavens became available, allowing the cook to make raised breads like biscuits, soda bread, coffee cake, and bannocks.  Oven-baked raised breads using barm, yeast, or sourdough starters include naan, Khamiri roti, and Arabic khubz, including pita, but in Europe an array of high-rising yeast breads unlike those known elsewhere arose.  Every region of Europe developed specialties: pain de mie, challah, pan gellego, ciabatta, pane Toscano, but the acknowledged masterpiece of European bread is the French baguette.  Countless excellent breads are made with whole wheat or with multiple grains, and I relish a sprinkling of sunflower, flax, and sesame seeds, yet for me as for most diners and bakers the acme of bread, the very best loaf, is a baguette.  (Baking all my life I continue to pursue the perfect baguette in my own kitchen.)  The contrast in texture between crust and interior and the pure and fresh wheaten taste, bland enough to complement any dinner made this the most common and iconic of French foodstuffs.  The very magic of the action of the yeast, creating bubbles and caverns, makes a light and variable loaf that is excellent with unsalted butter while not distracting from the other contents of a full plate.    

     People throughout the world, in the universal quest for intoxication, have made alcoholic drinks of whatever was hand: using the sap of palms to make wine in West Africa, agave for pulque in Mexico, rice for sake and mijiu in East Asia, even mare’s milk for Mongolian ayrag or kumis.  Each of these has its charms, particularly in its home territory with complementary climate and cuisine, yet the production of wine from grapes in Europe goes far beyond what was done elsewhere.  Surely the range is extraordinary from a dry and fine-bubbled sparkler, through the light fruit of Beaujolais, the grave and knotty flavor of pinot noir, the satin of Bordeaux, the musky hearth-like warmth of port, even the strong straw taste that lurks behind the sweetness of Tokay.  Surely for those who consume alcohol there is a wine for every taste and every moment.  The simple treatment of grape juice to preserve it and at the same time to induce inebriation became in Europe an elaborate aesthetic game, as any glance at wine literature will indicate, but one with resulting in dependable satisfaction.  

     Similarly, the cheese produced in Europe is far more varied than most of the world’s cheeses.  While fresh cheeses like the Indian panir or the Middle Eastern ackawi which are widespread are made also in  Europe: the familiar cottage cheese, German quark, and French fromage blanc.  The most distinctive European cheeses are, however, prepared with particular molds, fungi, and bacteria.  The litany of their names might suggest a cheese cantata: Brevibacterium linens is used in making Limburger, Penicillium glaucum for gorgonzola, Propionibacterium freundenreichii makes the holes in Swiss, and Penicillium camemberti and its cousin Penicillium roqueforti for camembert and roquefort.  The flavors may be mild or sharp, bland or salty, perhaps nutty or smoky, the textures light or dense soft or hard, smooth or grainy, a grand array of possibilities unequaled elsewhere in the globe. 

     Many foodstuffs are most appealing in natural form.  Fresh apricots can scarcely be improved, new peas and a beefsteak need only a bit of cooking and seasoning, while oysters and clams are best utterly au naturel.  The satisfaction of fresh milk, salted peanuts, tomatoes just plucked from the garden, and countless other foods is universal.  Cuisines differentiate, however, when more complex preparation is employed, often resulting in a product that could not really be foreseen in its raw materials.  Bread, wine, and cheese are all the result of fermentation, and the astonishing variety of each of these basic foods is a testament to our species’ ingenuity, demonstrating the power of art to transform nature.  These products are not simply foods; they are feats of imaginative and aesthetic judgement.

     They are, we may be glad, artistic creations with physical substance.  I sit this afternoon on my front porch in a soft breeze, hearing the birds of late summer.  With a piece of baguette, some thin slices of Gouda, and a glass of Chateau Garreau, I may partake of these pinnacles of European cuisine all at once and, to enjoy such a feast, one need not do any preparation whatever, though today’s bread is homemade. 

Every Reader’s Tennyson

  

     This is the sixteenth of a series of Every Reader’s Poets, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important English poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, 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.  The general introduction to the series titled “Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.

     Tennyson’s poetry is readily available on line, but for the reader’s convenience I have here appended the poems I discuss.

 

 

     Every poem, indeed, every utterance, is a combination of familiar and novel elements.  We relish some poets for their idiosyncratic sensibilities, thrillingly contrasting with the reader’s more normative reactions.  Among the writers prized for seeing the world in a way dramatically different from others are Blake in the English tradition and Rimbaud in the French.  At the same time other writers, some equally gifted, excel at representing received opinions so precisely that they become culture bearers for a generation.  Though the description does not hold in every particular, Vergil in antiquity, Trollope in fiction, and Longfellow in the United States may be found toward the conventional side of the spectrum.

     Alfred, Lord Tennyson is an author of this latter sort.  Though unsuccessful in his first ventures as an author, at the age of thirty-three his new volume of Poems was well-received and a mere eight years later he was named Poet Laureate, a position he held longer than any of his predecessors, from 1850 until 1892, long enough to be considered an institution.  Gerard Manley Hopkins was bothered by a “vulgarity” in his work which allowed him to achieve a “vogue” but not “ascendancy.”  Tennyson was more popular with Queen Victoria and other rear-guard aristocrats as well as among the middle-class book-buying public.  Enough of a genuine celebrity to find himself pestered by poetry-loving tourists, his funeral in Westminster Abbey (where one may yet visit his grave) attracted over ten thousand applicants for the thousand seats assigned to the general public, while a great many more citizens clustered outside.  The invited mourners included scholars like Benjamin Jowett and numerous dukes, marquis, and bishops.  It is difficult to imagine such a fuss over any poet’s death today.  In The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, that museum of words, Tennyson is given more pages than any other writer with the single exception of William Shakespeare.

     With time his sentiments came to seem overdrawn, his attitudes conformist, and the fantasy of medievalism with which he had captivated the public in his Idylls of the King and other works became passé.  With the arrival of free verse in the twentieth century, fewer readers appreciated Tennyson’s mastery of meters, though he was perhaps the most skillful prosodist since Pope.  Even his successor to the dignity of the laureateship, Alfred Austin, himself an indifferent poet, while obliged to concede that “the present age, taken in the lump, likes Mr. Tennyson’s poetry,” found him third-rate.  His reputation never has recovered. 

     Perhaps the best illustration of his successful use of conventional opinion is the non-partisan if unthinking patriotism of his best-known poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (the text is appended), which celebrates the valor of the British soldiers in the Crimean War who, as the result of an erroneous order, attempted an impossible objective and were cut to pieces.  This simple sentiment so appealed to British nationalism (and to American as well) that the poem soon found a place in school curricula and memorial assemblies.  Its brevity, repetitions, and jangling rhymes make it as digestible as a nursery rhyme.

     The reader needs know no history.  The soldiers are exemplary citizens specifically because they obey without reflection. 

 

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Because such dedication is an ideal of all ruling classes in every time and place, the poem sheds little light on the author’s attitudes or the specific historical circumstances of the war, yet this generic quality is what makes it so instantly understandable to all and so comforting to the fellow-countrymen of the fallen.    

     Tennyson was often far more subtle.  He reflected the changes in taste as British culture shifted from feudalism to capitalism and the Victorian world-view was shaken not only by Marx, but also by Darwin and the scientific study of the Bible and of non-Christian scriptures.  Thus Tennyson, while in a sense as laureate the official propagandist for the regime (and found himself writing works such as “A Welcome to Alexandra” for the Queen Dowager upon her return from overseas) was in fact in politics a mild liberal a bit in advance of his more backward compatriots and in religion somewhat slippery, tending in the end toward the broadest opinions, even beyond the borders of Christianity.  The tensions generated by his uncertainty are often evident and modern readers are likely to identify with his Angst and his ambiguity more than with the pose of confident and conservative opinion that won him renown during his life. 

     One of Tennyson’s most lovely lyrics, “Tears, Idle Tears” (text appended) articulates such a dialectic while at the same time appealing to nineteenth century sentimentality.  Ambivalence is foregrounded even in the title.  The “tears” expressing a pathetic emotion are checked by the qualifier “idle,” posing the poem’s question – “I know not what they mean” – at the outset.  They are the age-old tears inspired by mortality and the passing of time, familiar poetic themes since Gilgamesh.  Such tears “rise in the heart” when contemplating “the happy Autumn-fields” and “thinking of the days that are no more.”  The naming of the season means belatedness and the approach of death, yet the scene is nonetheless “happy.”

     Rather than eliding this tension, Tennyson develops the contradiction in extraordinary images.  The thoughts of the past, though dwelling on the departed are still “fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,” while at the same time “sad as the last” beam of daylight.  The days gone by are “sad” since they are not recoverable, and the distress they inspire is heightened because they remain “fresh,” as powerful in the memory as they had been at first. 
     Tennyson then constructs the most precise and telling image of this contradiction.  The “freshness” of memory is now figured as morning birdsong light, but heard by “dying ears.”  With cinematic power the poet depicts the sickroom during sunrise as the light slowly increases.  In the face of the collision of life and death, he can only muse in wonder “so sad, so strange.”  

     Tennyson seeks to resolve his anxiety by embracing the unity of the opposite ends of the bipolar opposition.  In the penultimate stanza all the images have this compound character.  The summer is “dark,” the moment teeters between night and day, the ears and eyes are “dying” yet alert, the casement displays both light and shade.  The poet can only sigh and repeat in wonder “so sad, so strange.”

     After two stanzas detailing the deathbed scene, the poem concludes with the romantic application of regret, the shock of reaching out in embrace only to find one’s lover a phantom due to death or faithlessness or simply the inexorable passage of time.  Even love, it seems, is inescapably “Death in Life” due to the transient character of all experience.  Just as life is bound always death, joy cannot be without pain, and all love necessarily entails loss.  Tennyson here offers a more nuanced if less popular attitude than simply portraying love as the saving grace of life.  Christianity plays no role.

     Tennyson walks the same fine line between the popular appeal which tends toward saying all is well and the darker intuitions of his soul in "In Memoriam A.H.H.," an elegy for his dear friend Arthur Hallam  (Canto LIII is appended).  Though the book-length poem enjoyed immense popularity (an appeal that eludes any book of poetry today) including the approval of Queen Victoria who said she was “soothed & pleased” by the poem during her mourning for Albert, it contains much distressed agnosticism.  The beginning and ending, though, adopt a pose of orthodoxy.  The first lines address the “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,” and conclusion confidently imagines that his deceased friend lives now in God.

 

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

 

     Yet between these expressions of conventional religiosity, Tennyson concedes the impact of the science of his day which seemed to contradict a literal reading of the Bible: evolution, geological history, Higher Criticism as well as his own internal crises of belief.  Similarly on the smaller scale, canto LIII walks the ridgepole between belief and disbelief. 

     All the rhetoric is deeply ambiguous.  Beginning with a cry of the lyric pathos “Oh,” the poet says “yet,” that is, in spite of evidence to the contrary, we “trust,” since we cannot know, that “somehow” “good will the final goal of ill.”  The statement could hardly be more conflicted.  The poet is so confounded that he must in the end throw up his hands and give up, declaring “we know not anything” and comparing himself to an infant who can only cry. 

       Philosophically, of course, Tennyson was striving to attain an unlikely position, to imagine that in some way hidden from human view, every pain serves a beneficent end.  He represented a good many other middlebrow British citizens who were comforted by his platitudes, cleaving always to the accepted standards of the day.  Tennyson in fact embodied his Zeitgeist so well specifically because remained superficially loyal to accepted opinion despite being troubled by religious doubts that would not have occurred in an age of hegemonic faith and by sympathy for political reform tendencies that were aimed at ending feudalism and softening capitalism. 

     Tennyson found an effective escape from the disquiet induced by modernity’s ambiguities other than seconding received opinion.  He ornamented his bourgeois practicality with gay ribands of aristocratic glamor by recalling a mythic past.  A good number of his most popular works developed the idealized picture of the Middle Ages now known as Medievalism that inspired pre-Raphaelite painting, Gothic Revival architecture, research into balladry, and, for Tennyson, poems like The Idylls of the King and such shorter pieces as “The Lady of Shalott.”  Bedivere’s lament over the dying Arthur in “Morte d’Arthur” expresses nostalgia for a lost world where everything made sense and fostered excellence.  The Round Table is here explicitly an image for the fallen world, tangled with sin since the expulsion from Eden, further degraded by the collapse of chivalric values, and, in the poet’s own time, sullied by the physical and spiritual pollution of industrial capitalism.  While propriety forbids direct protest, one may, perhaps sentimentally, but also with effective elegance, allude to more blessed earlier times.    

 

       Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole Round Table is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world,

And I, the last, go forth companionless,

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

 

The taste for this sort of thing has not quite vanished, it has merely reached an epigone in phenomena like Game of Thrones, so-called Renaissance Faires, The Society for Creative Anachronism, and over-priced restaurants where one may dine while people play at sword-fighting. 

     Tennyson was a major poet in a sense now extinct.  Mass audiences read lengthy works and cried and sighed and smiled.  Tennyson was the favorite of a demographic which in today’s time prefers television and films and reads no poetry at all. His mastery of meters was widely appreciated in viva voce readings and he both expressed the experience of millions and, in turn, influenced them, embodying the culture of his day.  If contemporary Americans find less beauty in his verse, perhaps that means that we have the more to learn from him.    

 

 

 

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

 

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

 

Flash’d all their sabres bare,

Flash’d as they turn’d in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder’d:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro’ the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel’d from the sabre-stroke

Shatter’d and sunder’d.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

 

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d.

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

 

 

 

 

Tears, Idle Tears

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

 

         Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

 

         Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

 

         Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

 

 

In Memoriam, A. H. H., Canto LIII

 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

⁠Will be the final goal of ill,

⁠To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

 

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

⁠That not one life shall be destroy'd,

⁠Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

 

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

⁠That not a moth with vain desire

⁠Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another's gain.

 

Behold!;

⁠I can but trust that good shall fall

⁠At last—far off—at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

 

So runs my dream: but what am I?

⁠An infant crying in the night:

⁠An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.