Paracelsus

Paracelsus: Ah! the time-wiling loitering of a page
Through bower and over lawn, till eve shall bring
The stately lady’s presence whom he loves -
The broken sleep of the fisher whose rough coat
Enwraps the queenly pearl – these are faint types!
See, see they look on me: I triumph now!
But one thing, Festus, Michal! I have told
All I shall e’er disclose to mortal: say -
Do you believe I shall accomplish this?

Festus: I do believe!

Michal: I ever did believe!

Paracelsus: Those words shall never fade from out my brain!
This earnest of the end shall never fade!
Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal,
Two points in the adventure of the diver:
One – when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,
One – when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?
Festus, I plunge!

Robert Browning, Paracelsus (1835), end of Part One

A Panegyrick on the Blessed Virgin Mary

I do not tremble, when I write
A Mistress’ praise, but with delight
Can dive for pearls into the flood,
Fly through every garden wood,
Stealing the choice of flow’rs and wind,
To dress her body or her mind.

Anon., ‘A Panegyrick on the Blessed Virigin Mary’ (1635), opening lines.

One of the prefatory poems to Antony Stafford’s The Femall Glory of the Life and Death of our Blessed Lady, 1635.

Hyperion

Ere half this region-whisper had come down,
Hyperion arose, and on the stars
Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide
Until it ceas’d; and still he kept them wide:
And still they were the same bright, patient stars.
Then with a slow incline of his broad breast,
Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
Forward he stoop’d over the airy shore,
And plung’d all noiseless into the deep night.

John Keats, Hyperion (1820), from Book One

Hyperion

Then came enchantment with the shifting wind,
That did both drown and keep alive my ears.
I threw my shell away upon the sand,
And a wave fill’d it, as my sense was fill’d
With that new blissful golden melody.
A living death was in each gush of sounds,
Each family of rapturous hurried notes,
That fell, one after one, yet all at once,
Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string.

John Keats, Hyperion (1820), from Book Two

The Botanic Garden

No radiant pearl which crested Fortune wears,
No gem that twinkling hangs from Beauty’s ears,
Not the bright stars which Night’s blue arch adorn,
Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn,
Shine with such lustre as the tear that flows
Down Virtue’s manly cheek for other’s woes.

Erasmus Darwin, ‘The Botanic Garden’ (1791), part two, canto three

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), fourteenth stanza

The Feet of People Walking Home

Pearls are the Diver’s Farthings
Extorted from the sea -

Emily Dickinson, ‘The Feet of People Walking Home’ (c.1858), extract