Image | Brancaleone/Savic
O Mistress Mine
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low:
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies not plenty;
Then, come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
~ William Shakespeare
She bids you first, in Life’s soft vernal Hours,
With active industry wake Nature’s powers;
With rising Years, still rising Arts display,
With new-born Graces mark each new-born Day.
‘Tis now Time young Passion to command,
While yet the pliant Stem obeys the Hand;
Guide now the Courser with a steady Rein,
E’er yet he bounds o’er Pleasure’s flow’ry Plain;
In Passion’s Strife, no medium you can have;
You rule a Master, or submit a Slave.
~Benjamin Franklin, 1758
Music, When Soft Voices Die
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory —
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts when thou are gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
~ Percy Shelley
To a Stranger?
Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking?(It comes to me as a dream)
I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me, ?I
ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,?? I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
Walt Whitman