Sonnet

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
Upsoars, and darts into the eastern light,
On opinions that naught moves but pure delight,
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love;
Where happy spirits, crown'd with circlets bright
taste the high joy none but the blest can prove.
There thou or joinest the immortal quire
In melodies that even heaven fair
Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire
Of the omnipotent Father, cleavest the air
On holy message sent - What pleasures higher?
Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?

-- John Keats --

On Death

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain's to die.

How strange is that man on this earth should roam,
And lead a life, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone
His future doom which is but to awake.

-- John Keats --

Sonet of Liberty

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,-
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my widest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother - !Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved - and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some thing.

-- Oscar Wilde --

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

    --R.N.Tagore--

Faust

Das ist die Welt
Sie steigt und faellt
Und rollt bestaendig
Sie klingt wie Glas-
Wie bald bricht das!
Ist hohl inwendig.
Hier glaenzt sie sehr,
Und hier noch mehr:
Ich bin lebendig!
Mein lieber Sohn,
Halt dich davon!
Du musst sterben!
Sie ist von Ton,
Es gibt Scherben.

--Goethe--