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The sea is calm to-night,
The tide
is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits, - on the French coast
the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering
and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is
the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea
meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return,
up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness
in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean,
and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human
misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this
distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the
full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle
furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the
vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor
love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms
of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Love
is, above all, the gift of oneself.
Jean Anouilh
When I am sad and
weary. When I think all hope has gone.
When I walk along High Holborn,
I think of you with nothing on .
Adrian Mitchell
Those
have most power to hurt us that we love
Francis Beaumont
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