"Instructions in Emperor Worship" (Riding & Tennyson)

To make the day an hour longer.
With self-wrought evil of unnumbered years,
Yet nothing runs like prey.

You flash and lighten afar:
You lone survivor on paper,
There, while the rest were loud with merry-making.

The poppy edifices of sleep,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
At the dissolving border,

Get thee hence, nor come again,
Where wing on wing folds in
Short fits of prayer, at every stroke a breath.

And you may write it as it seems,
All in a fiery dawning wild with wind
Amidst seeming speed.

Because the scale is infinite.
One shivering midsummer
The parrot in his gilded wires.

Will rise the secret, will flower up
The weight of all the hopes of half the world,
To the perilous margin, moment.

But till this cosmic order everywhere
What feel and fragrance?
Springing alone

if I perhaps such same fatality
Or else I dream--and for so long a time,
That strangeness is not strange.

Then, on a golden autumn eventide,
As it will lie unread,
Let visions of the night or of the day

The reasons, then, of this one, that one,
Come not, when I am dead,
To know how poor, how less than full

That most of them would follow wandering fires,
And no new harvest to fraction sowing.
Heard on the winding waters, eve and morn

Whose grace goes out in utmost rings
Upon the last and sharpest height,
A thousand years and more

And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald
And words below a whisper which
Before us, and against the chapel door

Hunger went.
O me! what profits it to put
Call within call

Receive, and yield me sanctuary, nor ask
Because I sit here so,
I am but as my fortunes are:

The shallow terrors, waking never far.
And all at once should sally out upon me,
Claim the conjectured corpse

This conquers: hide it therefore; go unknown;
For loyal prophetic heat
With promise of a morn as fair;

Whether the plight more ours,
And soil'd with all ignoble use.
Aura of tattered hopes

Be merry on earth as you never were merry before,
The immeasurable areas of distress
And each of them is wholly arm'd, and one

The wind takes, not the earth,
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
One flower I saw, one I didn't,

And left me gazing at a barren board,
If this be I.
That makes me maudlin-moral.

To their momentary finish in
A ghastly something, and its shadow flew
To this awakened not forgetting.

Forever and forever when I move.
Glory the mirror and the beauty;
And, making there a sudden light beheld

The upper air usurping
And others' follies teach us not,
The dogs still bark,

Waiting to see me die.
Or were otherwise insane,
And moving thro' a mirror clear

All that was like enough to now
What is it that I may not fear?
And dear the evil name;

Beside the never-lighted fire.
The reason of the saint that he is saintly,
About the flowering squares, and thick

Nor speaking coruscation
The snake slipt under a spray,
An hour was taken

Go by, go by.
For love of hell is empty
If any care for what is here

There is much that we have not to be.
We stumbled on a stationary voice,
I know

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
There were never covenants:
O there above the little grave,

Love has no elsewhere.
But that remorseless iron hour
And the ventriloquist gulls,

We saw not, when we moved therein?

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