in doubt

[In Lady Blessington's Conversations with Lord Byron these lines are thus introduced : 'I will give you some stanzas I wrote yesterday (said Byron); they are as simple as even Wordsworth himself could write, and would do for music.']

BUT once I dared to lift my eyes,
To lift my eyes to thee;
And, since that day, beneath the skies,
No other sight they see.

In vain sleep shuts them in the night,
The night grows day to me,
Presenting idly to my sight
What still a dream must be.

I am ashes where once I was fire,

And the bard in my bosom is dead; What I loved I now merely admire,

And my heart is as grey as my head.

My life is not dated by years;

There are moments which act as a plough;
And there is not a furrow appears
But is deep in my soul as my brow.

Let the young and the brilliant aspire
To sing what I gaze on in vain;
For Sorrow has torn from my lyre
The string which was worthy the strain.
B.
[First published, 1830.]

ARISTOMENES

[First published in the Edition of 1901 from a manuscript in the possession of the Lady Dorchester.]

CANTO FIRST

I

I am a fool of passion, and a frown
Of thine to me is as an adder's eye.
To the poor bird whose pinion fluttering
down

Wafts unto death the breast it bore so high;

Such is this maddening fascination grown, So strong thy magic or so weak am I.

ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR

[Moore relates in the Life that on his last birthday Byron came from his bedroom into the apartment where Colonel Stanhope and some others were assembled and said with a smile, "You were complaining the other day that I never write any poetry now. This is my birthday, and I have just finished something which, I think, is better than what I usually write."- The pathos and sincerity of the verses are echoed in Mangan's The Nameless One, though the spirit of the two poems is not the same. e.]