The Awaking of the Poetic Faculty

ALL day I heard a humming in my ears.

A buzz of many voices, and a throng

Of swarming numbers, passing with a song

Measured and stately as the rolling spheres.

I saw the sudden light of lifted spears,

Slanted at once against some monster wrong;

And then a fluttering scarf which might belong

To some sweet maiden in her morn of years.

I felt the chilling damp of sunless glades,

Horrid with gloom; anon, the breath of May

Was blown around me, and the lulling play

Of dripping fountains. Yet the lights and shades,

The waving scarfs, the battle's grand parades

Seemed but vague shadows of that wondrous lay.

George Henry Boker

Love is that orbit . . .

LOVE is that orbit of the restless soul

Whose circle grazes the confines of space,

Bounding within the limits of its race

Utmost extremes; whose high and topmost pole

Within the very glaze of heaven doth roll;

Whose nether course is through the darkest place

Eclipsed by hell. What daring hand shall trace

The blended joys and sorrows that control

A heart whose journeys the fixed hand of Fate

Points through this pathway? Who may soar so high, --

Behold such glories with unwinking eye?

Who drop so low beneath his mortal state,

And thence return with careful chart and date,

To mark which way another's course must lie?

George Henry Boker