We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words:
O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten
With pleasure and love and jubilee:
O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten
When the sharp clear twang of the golden cords
Runs up the ridged sea.
Who can light on as happy a shore
All the world o'er, all the world o'er?
Whither away? listen and stay: mariner, mariner, fly no more.


[Footnote 1: Bight is properly the coil of a rope; it then came to mean
a bend, and so a corner or bay. The same phrase occurs in the 'Voyage of
Maledune', v.: "and flung them in bight and bay".]






THE DESERTED HOUSE

First printed in 1830, omitted in all the editions till 1848 when it was
restored. The poem is of course allegorical, and is very much in the
vein of many poems in Anglo-Saxon poetry.


1

Life and Thought have gone away