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    Perpetual Light : a memorial
    Perpetual Light : a memorial
    Perpetual Light : a memorial
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Perpetual Light : a memorial

    By William Rose Benét

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    Perpetual Light : a memorial

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      Book preview

      Perpetual Light - William Rose Benét

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Perpetual Light, by William Rose Benet

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      **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

      **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

      *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

      Title: Perpetual Light

      Author: William Rose Benet

      Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6597] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 30, 2002]

      Edition: 10

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ASCII, with a few ISO-8859-1 characters

      *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PERPETUAL LIGHT ***

      Produced by Skip Doughty, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

      PERPETUAL LIGHT

      Ah, do not turn to me that face which is no longer of this world!… There are enough angels to serve the mass in Heaven! Have pity on me, who am only a man without wings, who rejoiced in this companion God had given me, and that I should hear her sigh with her head resting on my shoulder!… the bitterness like the bitterness of myrrh… And for you age is already come. But how hard it is to renounce when the heart is young!

      THE TIDINGS BROUGHT TO MARY

      PERPETUAL LIGHT

      A Memorial.

      BY

      WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

      ..that we may be able to arrive with pure minds at the festival of perpetual light. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. —Oremus.

      DEDICATION

      TO KATHLEEN AND MARGARET

      Think of no verse when you read this,

      But think of her alone

      And her enduring benefice,

      Sunlight on stone.

      For day is stone and night is stone

      Save she has made them bright,

      Now she knows all that may be known

      Of day and night.

      Courage like hers we have from her,

      Strength to be straight and brave,

      And noble memories that recur

      And heal and save.

      By her clear eyes, by her pure brows,

      We take the Sign,

      And kneel within her Father's house—

      And yours and mine.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      The first eleven poems in the section entitled, Before originally appeared in my first volume, Merchants from Cathay published by the Century Company. This volume is now out of print and I hold the copyright. The three poems following these originally appeared in my second volume, The Falconer of God and Other Poems. For permission to reprint a few of the remaining poems I have to thank the editors of Reedy's Mirror, The Bang, The Lyric, The Madrigal, The Sun Dial (New York Evening Sun), Everybody's Magazine, The Century Magazine, and Books and the Book World (New York Sunday Sun). For the group, The Long Absence in the section entitled, After, I owe thanks to The Yale Review.

      CONTENTS

      FOREWORD

      BEFORE

        The Snare of the Fowler

        Thwarted Utterance

        The Song of Her

        Always I Know You Anew

        The Rival Celestial

        The Tamer of Steeds

        Love in Armor

        Wardrobe of Remembrance

        The Second Covenant

        Dedication to a First Book

        The Shadowed Road

        Love in the Dawn

        Had I a Claim to Fame?

        The One

        Dream and Deed

        A Taper of Incense

        To Purity

        Atonement

        The Adoration

        Talisman

        Recognition

        The Silver Hind

        Aristeas Relates His Youth

        Man Possessed

        Miniature

        Death Will Make Clear

        Sunlight

        And a Long Way Off He Saw Fairyland

        In Time of Trouble

        Anomaly

        The Lover

        Judgment

        Unforgotten

        The Pale Dancer

        Premonition

      AFTER

        Introductory Poem

        The Long Absence

        By the Counsel of Her Hands

        Strength Beyond Strength

        Que Sais-Je?

        Ebb-Tide

        Coward

        Aquilifer

        The Woman

        Pervigilium

        Time Was

        The Masters

        When

        Children

        The Retreat

        Sealed

      FOREWORD

      TERESA FRANCES THOMPSON, who also bore my name by marriage, died on January 26, 1919. This verse is published to her memory, because I wish to keep together the poetry she occasioned and enable those who loved her—and they were a great many-to know definitely what she was to me.

      I think that is the truth. This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.

      As I turn these poems over—if they are even to be called poems—I realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was. The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark. Those between are fragments from the days when we were struggling along together at the everyday tasks and outside interests and dreams that possessed us. The war entered our lives to change them in September, 1917. The poem, Man Possessed, was written within sound of her actual voice, the others all in absence from her at various times and in moods made strange by absence.

      And yet this is all I have at present to give in her memory. But I hold by these because—though they are poor, freakish fragments as far as any real expression of her is concerned—they were made for her.

      It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so many sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a forthright splendid intelligence.

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