Memorabilia Poem By Robert Browning

Memorabilia

  - By Robert Browning

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, 

And did he stop and speak to you? 

And did you speak to him again? 

How strange it seems, and new! 

But you were living before that, 

And you are living after, 

And the memory I started at — 

My starting moves your laughter. 

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own 

And a certain use in the world no doubt, 

Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 

'Mid the blank miles round about: 

For there I picked up on the heather 

And there I put inside my breast 

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather— 

Well, I forget the rest. 

Earth Song By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Earth Song

                                          - By Ralph Waldo Emerson 

      Mine and yours;

     Mine, not yours.

        Earth endures; Stars abide—

        Shine down in the old sea;

        Old are the shores;

        But where are old men?

        I who have seen much,

        Such have I never seen.

        'The lawyer's deed

        Ran sure,  In tail,

        To them, and to their heirs

        Who shall succeed,

        Without fail,

        Forevermore.

        'Here is the land,

        Shaggy with wood,

        With its old valley,

        Mound and flood.

         But the heritors?—

        Fled like the flood's foam.

        The lawyer, and the laws,

        And the kingdom,

        Clean swept herefrom.

        'They called me theirs,

         Who so controlled me;

        Yet every one

        Wished to stay, and is gone,

        How am I theirs,

        If they cannot hold me,

        But I hold them?'

           When I heard the Earth-song

      I was no longer brave;

My avarice cooled

                  Like lust in the chill of the grave.