“Were I with thee…”

photograph by Harold Wijnholds via Unsplash

WILD nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

— Emily Dickinson

I Pretend

Hyperion

Popular Mechanics, 1974

“Saturn, look up!—though wherefore, poor old King?
I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
I cannot say, “O wherefore sleepest thou?”
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre pass’d; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractis’d hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years!

— Keats, Hyperion

She Brings the Rain

“Is it not Tennyson who has said: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost…”

Lejaren à Hiller, Fatima Cigarettes advertisement (ca. 1922)

…is it not Tennyson who has said: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all?

—Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh