Andrew Marvell

O, who shall from this dungeon raise A soul enslaved so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fettered stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear;

But now the salmon-fishers moist Their leathern boats begin to hoist; And, like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes. How tortoise-like, but not so slow, These rational amphibii go!

’Tis not what once it was, the world, But a rude heap together hurled.

Unhappy birds! what does it boot To build below the grass’s root, When lowness is unsafe as height, And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite?

And now to the abyss I pass Of that unfathomable grass, Where men like grasshoppers appear, But grasshoppers are giants there: They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn Us as we walk more low than them:

For he did, with his utmost skill, Ambition weed, but conscience till: Conscience, that heaven-nursèd plant, Which most our earthy gardens want. A prickling leaf it bears, and such As that which shrinks at every touch;

Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou paradise of four seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With watery if not flaming sword;

A stately frontispiece of poor Adorns without the open door: Nor less the rooms within commends Daily new furniture of friends. The House was built upon the place Only as for a mark of grace;

What need of all this marble crust T’impark the wanton mote of dust.

He is translation’s thief that addeth more, As much as he that taketh from the store Of the first author.

Had it lived long, it would have been Lilies without, roses within.

I have a garden of my own But so with roses overgrown, And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness.

It is a wondrous thing, how fleet ’Twas on those little silver feet. With what a pretty skipping grace, It oft would challenge me the race: And when ’t had left me far away, ’Twould stay, and run again, and stay.

Choosing each stone, and poising every weight, Trying the measures of the breadth and height; Here pulling down, and there erecting new, Founding a firm state by proportions true.

If these the Times, then this must be the Man.

Like the vain curlings of the watery maze, Which in smooth streams a sinking weight does raise, So Man, declining always, disappears In the weak circles of increasing years; And his short tumults of themselves compose, While flowing Time …

For Juliana comes, and she, What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

'Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot, While the sweet fields do lie forgot, Where willing Nature does to all dispense A wild and fragrant innocence.

And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time.

Oh let our voice his praise exalt, Till it arrive at heaven’s vault: Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.

And makes the hollow seas, that roar, Proclaim the ambergris on shore. He cast (of which we rather boast) The gospel’s pearl upon our coast.

He hangs in shades the Orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night.

Where the remote Bermudas ride, In th' ocean's bosom unespied.

Music, the mosaic of the air.