Poem by Louise Imogen Guiney

To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Young father-poet! much in you I praise
Adventure high, romantic, vehement,
All with inviolate honour sealed and blent,
To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays:
Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays;
And, most, your verse, with strict imperious bent,
Heard sweetly as from some old harper’s tent,
And surging in the listener’s brain for days.
At Framlingham to-night, if there should be
No guest, beyond a sea-born wind that sighs,
No guard, save moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears,
And I, your pilgrim, call you, O let me
In at the gate! and smile into the eyes
That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.

1. In a Ruin, after a Thunder-Storm
2. In a London Street
3. A Salutation
4. York Stairs
5. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford

Print

1677 Views

Last Poems

To Russian version