Sonnets.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Rule_Segment_-_Span_-_20px.svg/20px-Rule_Segment_-_Span_-_20px.svg.png)
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THE SOUL'S EXPRESSION.
With stammering lips and insufficient sound,
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling, interwound;
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height,
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud,—my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling, interwound;
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height,
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud,—my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Rule_Segment_-_Span_-_20px.svg/20px-Rule_Segment_-_Span_-_20px.svg.png)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Rule_Segment_-_Righttriangle_-_5px.svg/3px-Rule_Segment_-_Righttriangle_-_5px.svg.png)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/Rule_Segment_-_Lefttriangle_-_5px.svg/3px-Rule_Segment_-_Lefttriangle_-_5px.svg.png)
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THE SERAPH AND POET.
The seraph sings before the manifest
God-one, and in the burning of the Seven,
And with the full life of consummate Heaven
Heaving beneath him like a mother's breast
Warm with her first-born's slumber in that nest:
The poet sings upon the earth grave-riven;
Before the naughty world soon self-forgiven
For wronging him; and in the darkness prest
God-one, and in the burning of the Seven,
And with the full life of consummate Heaven
Heaving beneath him like a mother's breast
Warm with her first-born's slumber in that nest:
The poet sings upon the earth grave-riven;
Before the naughty world soon self-forgiven
For wronging him; and in the darkness prest