4.

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,

Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.

Death is the end of life; ah! why

Should life all labour be?

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence, ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease!

5.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,

With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;

To hear each other's whisper'd speech;
Eating the Lotos, day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray:
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy

Heap'd over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

6.

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,

And dear the last embraces of our wives

And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change;

For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten-years war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.

Is there confusion in the little isle ?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile:

'Tis hard to settle order once again.

There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

7.

But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly,)

With half-dropt eyelids still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly

His waters from the purple hill

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine—

To hear the emerald-colour'd water falling

Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

8.

The Lotos blooms below the flowery peak:

The Lotos blows by every winding creek:

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust

is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge

was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains

in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly

curl'd

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming

world:

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer-some, 'tis whisper’d—
down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.