Poem by Charles Tennyson Turner

The Hydraulic Ram, or The Influence of Sound on Mood

In the hall grounds, by evening-gloom concealed,
He heard the solitary water-ram
Beat sadly in the little wood-girt field,
So dear to both! "Ah! wretched that I am!"
He said, "And traitor to my love and hers!
Why did I vent those words of wrath and spleen,
That changed her cheek, and flushed her gentle mien?
When will they yield her back, those jealous firs,
Into whose shelter two days since she fled
From my capricious anger, phantom-fed?
When will her sire his interdict unsay?
Or must I learn a lonely lot to bear,
As this imprisoned engine, night and day,
Plies its dull pulses in the darkness there?"

1. The South-Foreland Electric Light
2. Silkworms and Spiders
3. The Sonneteer to the Sea-Shell
4. On the Eclipse of the Moon of October 1865
5. The Buoy-Bell

Print

1704 Views

Last Poems

To Russian version