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Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth cover

Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth

Chapter 36: TO A FRIEND LOST. (T. T.)
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About This Book

A varied collection of lyrics and sonnets that celebrates the sensory life of earth while probing larger moral and philosophical questions. Poems evoke woodlands, meadows, and pastoral music, employ classical and mythic allusion, and meditate on love, change, and the tension between wild impulse and cultivated wisdom. Ballads and shorter lyrics supply narrative motion and vivid imagery; sonnets compress reflective argument about time, art, and the self. The overall tone moves between exuberant celebration and guarded instruction, using musical diction and dense metaphor to connect natural perception with human feeling and ethical awareness.

TO A FRIEND LOST.
(T. T.)

When I remember, friend, whom lost I call,
Because a man beloved is taken hence,
The tender humour and the fire of sense
In your good eyes; how full of heart for all,
And chiefly for the weaker by the wall,
You bore that lamp of sane benevolence;
Then see I round you Death his shadows dense
Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall.
For surely are you one with the white host,
Spirits, whose memory in our vital air
Through the great love of Earth they had: lo, these,
Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas,
Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost,
Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.