[ely-s]

Desert Places by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it-it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less- A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars-on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

Ode by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy.

WE are the music-makers,

  And we are the dreamers of dreams, 

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams; 

World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world for ever, it seems. 

 

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story

  We fashion an empire's glory: 

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

  Shall go forth and conquer a crown; 

And three with a new song's measure Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying

  In the buried past of the earth, 

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

  And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o'erthrew them with prophesying

  To the old of the new world's worth; 

For each age is a dream that is dying,

  Or one that is coming to birth.