Sunday Up the River (1865)

• Give a man a horse he can ride,
  Give a man a boat he can sail;
  And his rank and wealth, his strength and health,
  On sea nor shore shall fail.
  • Part XV

• Give a man a girl he can love,
  As I, O my love, love thee;
  And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate,
  At home, on land, on sea.
  • Part XV

• The wine of Love is music,
  And the feast of Love is song:
  And when Love sits down to the banquet,
  Love sits long:

  Sits long and rises drunken,
  But not with the feast and the wine;
  He reeleth with his own heart,
  That great, rich Vine.

  • Part XVIII

The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)

• Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
  To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
  • Proem

• The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
  But certainly of Night; for never there
  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
  After the dewy dawning's cold grey air.
  • Part I

• For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
  Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
  And some by day.
  • Part I

• The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
  Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.
  • Part I

• The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
  There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
  A night seems termless hell.
  • Part I

• As I came through the desert thus it was,
  As I came through the desert: All was black,
  In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
  A brooding hush without a stir or note;
  The air so thick it clotted in my throat.
  • Part VI

• Yet I strode on austere;
  No hope could have no fear.
  • Part VI

• The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
  • Part VIII

• The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
  With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides,
  Vague-sounding through the City’s sleepless sleep,
  Is named the River of the Suicides.
  • Part XIX

• And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish
  In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,
  That one best sleep which never wakes again.
  • Part XIX