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Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
To a Friend
I ask but one thing of you, only one,
That always you will be my dream of you;
That never shall I wake to find untrue
All this I have believed and rested on,
Forever vanished, like a vision gone
Out into the night. Alas, how few
There are who strike in us a chord we knew
Existed, but so seldom heard its tone
We tremble at the half-forgotten sound.
The world is full of rude awakenings
And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground,
Yet still our human longing vainly clings
To a belief in beauty through all wrongs.
O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!
To a Friend appeared in Lowell's first book A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
in 1912. She was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
in 1926.
The above poem can be found, for example, in:
Lowell, Amy. The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955.
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