[Page 28]

PICTURE OF AN OLD MAN.

1 Old man, I saw thee in thy garden chair
2 Sitting in silence 'mid the shrubs and trees
3 Of thy small cottage-croft, whilst murmuring bees
4 Went by, and almost touched thy temples bare,
5 Edged with a few flakes of the whitest hair.
6 And, soothed by the faint hum of ebbing seas,
7 And song of birds, and breath of the young breeze,
8 Thus didst thou sit, feeling the summer air
9 Blow gently; with a sad still decadence,
10 Sinking to earth in hope, but all alone.
11 Oh! hast thou wept to feel the lonely sense
12 Of earthly loss, musing on voices gone!
13 Hush the vain murmur, that, without offence,
14 Thy head may rest in peace beneath the churchyard stone. [Page 29]

Text

  • TEI/XML (XML - 63K / ZIP - 6.2K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 664 / ZIP - 595 )

Facsimile (Source Edition)

(Page images digitized from a copy held at the University of California Libraries.)

Images

PDF

All Images (PDF - 477K)

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): PICTURE OF AN OLD MAN.
Themes:
Genres: sonnet

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Bowles, William Lisle, 1762-1850. The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. I. With Memoir, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes by George Gilfillan. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 9 North Bank Street..., 1855, pp. 28-29.  (Page images digitized from a copy held at the University of California Libraries.)

Editorial principles

Typography, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have been cautiously modernized. The source of the text is given and all significant editorial interventions have been recorded in textual notes. This ECPA text has been edited to conform to the recommendations found in Level 5 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries version 4.0.0.

Other works by William Lisle Bowles