A Song to David

Precious the bounteous widow’s mite;
And precious, for extreme delight,
The largesse from the churl:
Precious the ruby’s blushing blaze,
And alba’s blest imperial rays,
And pure cerulean pearl.

Precious the pentitential tear …

Christopher Smart, ‘A Song to David’ (1763), stanza (and line)

The Man and the Flea

Whether on earth, in air, or main,
Sure ev’ry thing alive is vain!
Does not the hawk all fowls survey,
As destin’d only for his prey?
And do not tyrants, prouder things,
Think men were born for slaves to kings?
When the crab views the pearly strands,
Or Tagus bright with golden sands,
Or crawls beside the coral grove,
And hears the ocean roll above,
“Nature is too profuse,” says he,
“Who gave all these to pleasure me!”
When bord’ring pinks and roses bloom,
And ev’ry garden breathes perfume,
When peaches glow with sunny dyes
Like Laura’s cheek when blushes rise,
When with huge figs the branches bend,
When clusters from the vine depend,
The snail looks round on flow’r and tree,
And cries, “All these were made for me!”

John Gay, Fable XLIX: The Man and the Flea (1727), first stanza

Don Juan

An infant when it gazes on a light,
A child the moment when it drains the breast,
A devotee when soars the Host in sight,
An Arab with a stranger for a guest,
A sailor when the prize has struck in fight,
A miser filling his most hoarded chest,
Feel rapture; but not such true joy are reaping
As they who watch o’er what they love while sleeping.

For there it lies so tranquil, so beloved,
All that it hath of life with us is living;
So gentle, stirless, helpless, and unmoved,
And all unconscious of the joy ‘t is giving;
All it hath felt, inflicted, pass’d, and proved,
Hush’d into depths beyond the watcher’s diving:
There lies the thing we love with all its errors
And all its charms, like death without its terrors.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Second, two stanzas (1819-1824) 

The Genii

Malignant tyrants! with vindictive ire,
The ocean heaving as your steps retire,
You trace the bark along the yielding main,
And smile, indignant – where your power was vain.
Hence, like the lightning’s flash, you rapid sweep
O’er the wild waters of the Atlantic deep,
Thro’ the long course of Orellana run,
To climes illumin’d by their parent fun;
Where, o’er Pacific seas, the tempests blow,
You rear your coral palaces below;
On crystal pedestals the emeralds raise,
And bid the sapphires on their summits blaze.
Your wat’ry reign no wanderer annoys,
Nor dares you deep retreats, or gloomy joys,

Save the poor Negro, on his dangerous way,
Thro’ the deep caverns of Panama’s bay,
While the black billows thro’ their fissures swell,
From fractur’d rocks to wrest the pearly shell.
As o’er the cliffs, he holds his slippery road,
To drag the treasures from their dark abode,
Your jealous eyes, tremendous rulers! spy
The fated victim you have doom’d to die.
Thus, when, all fainting with the tedious toil,
His weak frame loaded with the fever’d spoil,
He springs on high the surface to regain,
Repair his sinking strength, and breathe again;
From some wild gulf, that pours the sweeping storm,
The furious shark uprears his scaly form,
In awful hunger, rolls his flaming eyes;
The luckless sufferer turns, and shrieks, and dies.

Anne Bannerman, ‘The Genii’ (1800) , extract

Three Shadows

I looked and saw your eyes
In the shadow of your hair,
As a traveller sees the stream
In the shadow of the wood;
And I said, “My faint heart sighs,
Ah me! to linger there,
To drink deep and to dream
In that sweet solitude.”
I looked and saw your heart
In the shadow of your eyes,
As a seeker sees the gold
In the shadow of the stream;
And I said, “Ah me! what art
Should win the immortal prize,
Whose want must make life cold
And Heaven a hollow dream?”
I looked and saw your love
In the shadow of your heart,
As a diver sees the pearl
In the shadow of the sea;
And I murmured, not above
My breath, but all apart,—
“Ah! you can love, true girl,
And is your love for me?”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Three Shadows’ (1876) 

Hope

And yet our lot is given us in a land
Where busy arts are never at a stand;
Where science points her telescopic eye,
Familiar with the wonders of the sky;
Where bold inquiry, diving out of sight,
Brings many a precious pearl of truth to light;
Where nought eludes the persevering quest,
That fashion, taste, or luxury suggest.

William Cowper, ‘Hope’ (1782), extract 

In Praise of Angling

Here are no entrapping baits
To hasten to too hasty fates;
Unless it be
The fond credulity
Of silly fish, which (worldling like) still look
Upon the bait, but never on the hook;
Nor envy, ‘less among
The birds, for prize of their sweet song.

Go, let the diving negro seek
For gems, hid in some forlorn creek;
We all pearls scorn,
Save what the dewy morn
Congeals upon each little spire of grass,
Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass;
And gold ne’er here appears,
Save what the yellow Ceres bears.

Blest silent groves, O, may you be
Forever mirth’s best nursery!
May pure contents
Forever pitch their tents
Upon these downs, these rocks, these mountains,
And peace still slumber by these purling fountains,
Which we may every year
Meet, when we come a-fishing here.

Henry Wotton, ‘In Praise of Angling’ (16??), last three stanzas

A Florida Ghost

Down mildest shores of milk-white sand,
By cape and fair Floridian bay,
Twixt billowy pines — a surf asleep on land —
And the great Gulf at play,

Past far-off palms that filmed to nought,
Or in and out the cunning keys
That laced the land like fragile patterns wrought
To edge old broideries,

The sail sighed on all day for joy,
The prow each pouting wave did leave
All smile and song, with sheen and ripple coy,
Till the dusk diver Eve

Brought up from out the brimming East
The oval moon, a perfect pearl.
In that large lustre all our haste surceased,
The sail seemed fain to furl,

The silent steersman landward turned,
And ship and shore set breast to breast.
Under a palm wherethrough a planet burned
We ate, and sank to rest.

Sidney Lanier, ‘A Florida Ghost’ (1877), first five stanzas 

The Sphinx

His long hair was nine cubits’ span and coloured
like that yellow gem
Which hidden in their garment’s hem the
merchants bring from Kurdistan.

His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of
new-made wine:
The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure
of his eyes.

His thick soft throat was white as milk and
threaded with thin veins of blue:
And curious pearls like frozen dew were
broidered on his flowing silk.

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was
too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous
ocean-emerald,

That mystic moonlit jewel which some diver of
the Colchian caves
Had found beneath the blackening waves and
carried to the Colchian witch.

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Sphinx’ (1894), stanzas 45-49

The Australian Bell-Bird

I took the left, and for some cause unknown
Full fraught of hope and joy the way pursued,
Yet chose strong reasons speeding up alone
To fortify me ‘gainst a shock more rude.
E’en so the diver carrieth down a stone
In hand, lest he float up before he would,
And end his walk upon the rich sea-floor,
Those pearls he failed to grasp never to look on more.

Jean Ingelow, ‘The Australian Bell-Bird’ (1863?), stanza