WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 32: ROMANCE
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

ROMANCE

“Good cheap! Good cheap! Buy my golden ware!
Sunny-afternoon-color, happy-harvest-moon-color,
Burnished bright as Beauty’s golden hair!
O come buy!
Buy my rare golden ware!”
(But they never came anigh him, they went trooping by him,
To trade at the shop of Despair—
At the dark little shop of Despair!)
“Good cheap! Good cheap! Buy my magic ware!
All your meat shall savor of it, all your drink take flavor of it,
Yea, ’twill warm ye when the hearth is bare! O come buy!
Buy my fair golden ware!”
(But they hurried past the turning, with their fixed eyes burning,
Making haste to be cheated by Despair—
Buying dear at the counter of Despair!)