In Love For Long
I've been in love for
With what I cannot
And will contrive a
For the
That has no mould or shape,
From which there's no escape.
It is not even a name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as
As the established hill.
It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever
What it is I love?
This happy happy
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and
Between todays and morrows;
A little
Held in the world's vice.
And there it is
And careless as a child,
And in
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world's day long.
This love a moment
For what I do not
And in a moment
Is like the happy
That keeps its perfect
Between the tiger's
And vindicates its cause.
Edwin Muir
Other author posts
The Good Man in Hell
If a good man were ever housed in By needful error of the qualities, Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil, Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,
The Castle
All through that summer at ease we lay, And daily from the turret We watched the mowers in the And the enemy half a mile
Reading in Wartime
Boswell by my bed, Tolstoy on my table; Thought the world has bled For four and a half years, And wives' and mothers' tears Collected would be able To water a little field Untouched by anger and blood,
The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came By then we had made our covenant with silence,