Do Not Go As If To Call

She Walks in Beauty
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day
By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Do Not Go As If To Call

Do not go as if to call my love
A night of cloudless climes and starry skies,
Rather, roiled and random rapids,
Bearing time-undoing silt,
Of a wild river in spring flood;
Even call it dancing around too much fire.

Do not as if to make my face a sun,
Or praise an ounce of flesh,
Do not revise our hasty history,
Or betray in artful images the familiar mystery
Do not flatten what we scarcely understood:
We rolled in a bog and got covered in mud.

Make no mention of False-Solomon-Seal in May;
Tell no tales of hiding in roses.
But do not forget us standing
Open hood to open hood, parka to parka,
Breathing hot little breaths into each other’s faces
Out of cold noses.

Finally, as our time, like all true things
Winds back upon itself as down it curls,
And drops into utter duff, rife with patience,
Do not compare us now or ever to a summer’s day,
Rather, fog-bound dusk
In the waning weeks of long-worn winter;
Nights of endless tramping over the same tumbled ground
Under the footfalls of which can just be heard
Distinct notes of someone sitting on a ridge
In a grassy dawn, blowing lung-warmed air
Into the body of a hand-hewn earthen flute.