John William Inchbold

John William Inchbold Poems

1.

Mysterious force, as beautiful as strange,
And pure with beauty and with mystery,
Queen of the world in wide extent of range,
...

The lone parched land still yearns for later rains,
The hopeless exile for a sight of home,
...

O power of beauty on a woman's brow!
What strength is like to thine for good or ill?
Who dares attempt thine awful throne to fill
...

Are there no slaves but those who wear a chain?
None with the deep curse branded on their breast,
But those whose deadened sense finds sullen rest
...

To that unconscious Beauty that has wrought
In me, through many years in many lands,
By stream and wood and plain and barren strands,
...

Yet once again, O Spring, Spring sweet and fair!
In fresh March morning with the birds I sing,
The groves have had a bitter time to bear,
...

As clear as calm experience comes at last,
To weary wayfarer from some far land,
So dawns the thought whose setting long seemed past,
...

In midst of dark and dreary days and nights,
In sad and faded autumn of the year,
When we recall those past and pure delights,
...

Like unto echoed music in a dream,
A slowly sailing cloud in summer's sky,
Achieving some mysterious work on high,
...

There is a book wherein we sometimes see
A dim reflection of the face of God;
Awful at times these writings seem to be,
...

11.

I sing of love that has been sung before,
I tell the oldest tale of all the world;
But new or old, I sing yet more and more,
...

O wherefore ever onward Love, O why
Not rest with me awhile, and bid me take
Thine own sweet flowers that everywhere grow high
...

In a dream of the night,
Afar from the day,
By the soft moon light,
You passed my way.
...

I saw the stars look down upon the earth,
The cold moon blended with the trembling sea,
I watch'd the sun from earliest time of birth,
...

Although the yellow leaves are on the tree,
And summer's ruins thickly strew the ground,
And no bright flowers are in the sea-girt lea,
...

I know great clouds are all around the sky;
I know great rocks are seen along the shore;
Waves terrible, I know, dash loud and high,
...

I love, and therefore silent I remain,
Because I love, no jealousy is near;
I love! and love's expression can restrain,
...

To know thy will, O Love, itself is joy,
To do it an ineffable delight,
Unweariedly life's sweetness to employ
...

The sea is all unknown and dark to me,
Great blackness rests on rock and tree and field,
The sky above I only know to be,—
...

Do those pure eyes shine verily the same,
On any other eyes they chance to meet?
O tell to me, by Love's untarnished name,
...

John William Inchbold Biography

John William Inchbold (29 August 1830 – 23 January 1888) was an English painter born in Leeds, Yorkshire and influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite style. He was the son of a Yorkshire newspaper owner, Thomas Inchbold. Inchborld was born 29 April 1830 at Leeds, where Thomas Inchbold, his father, was proprietor and editor of the 'Leeds Intelligencer’. Having a great talent for drawing in his boyhood, he started as a draughtsman in the lithographic works of Messrs. Day & Haghe.[1] He became a pupil of Louis Haghe, the water-colour painter, and was a student at the Royal Academy in 1847. He exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1849, at the Academy in 1851, and in 1855 gained the enthusiastic praise of John Ruskin for, ‘The Moorland’, which was painted in illustration of a famous passage in ‘Locksley Hall’. His 'White Doe of Rylstone' was purchased by Ruskin. These were almost his only pictures connected by their titles with poetical fancy or legend, the landscapes which down to 1885 he continued, in spite of incessant discouragement, to contribute to the Academy, being chiefly topographical; and perhaps Ruskin's praise of his stern fidelity made him too merely literal a transcriber of nature. His best-known works are probably ‘The Jungfrau' (1857), On the Lake of Thun (1860), Tintagel' (1862), 'Gordale Scar' (1876),and 'Drifting' (1883); the last named is in the possession of Mr. Coventry Patmore. Inchbold was happy all his life in the friendship of poets and men of genius, which consoled him for the hostility of the Academy and the indifference of the public. His faults, especially the frequent hardness and chilliness of his general effects, contrasted with the over-brightness of particular portions, undoubtedly militated against the general attractiveness of his work; his failings were obtrusive, and the recognition of his merits demanded insight and sympathy. For fidelity, delicacy, and true though unadorned poetry of feeling, no painter of his day stood higher. Tennyson, Browning, Lord Houghton, and Sir Henry Thompson were among his admirers and supporters, and in Dr. Russell Reynolds he found a liberal and discriminating patron. A year or two before his death he had returned from Algeria with a large collection of sketches, in which the ordinary defects of his manner were less apparent. He died suddenly of disease of the heart at Headingly, near Leeds, 23 Jan. 1888. His memory was shortly afterwards honoured by Mr. Swinburne in a funereal ode of surpassing beauty. Inchbold himself was a poet of considerable mark; the sonnets in his 'Annus Amoris’, 1877, are interesting tokens of a refined and poetical mind, though perhaps not one possesses the finish and concentration demanded by this most difficult form of composition)

The Best Poem Of John William Inchbold

Art

Mysterious force, as beautiful as strange,
And pure with beauty and with mystery,
Queen of the world in wide extent of range,
Through every motion of the sky and sea,
And the sweet mother of all joy, our Earth
Whether in moment of her snowy rest,
Or autumn eve, or summer noon, or birth
Of spring time o'er an Alpine mountain's crest,
To touch thy robe is life, but to receive
Thy touch of fiery lip, then pierce with eye
Made clear and strong, and afterwards to weave
With all our heart, fair forms that cannot die:—
This bliss supreme being ours, thine own free gift,
Makes life one joy and dull time keen and swift.

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