Louise Imogen Guiney (Луиза Имоджен Гвини)

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.

Louise Imogen Guiney’s other poems:

  1. Undertones at Magdalen
  2. Columba and the Stork
  3. Writ in my Lord Clarendon’s “History of the Rebellion”
  4. An Epitaph for William Hazlitt
  5. On Leaving Winchester




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