Explore "A Poet's Sonnet" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If I should quit thee, sacrifice, forswear, / To what, my art, shall I give thee in keeping? / To the long winds of heaven? Shall these come sweeping / My songs forgone against my face and hair?
Or shall the mountain streams my lost joys bear, / My past poetic pain in the rain be weeping? / No, I shall live a poet waking, sleeping, / And I shall die a poet unaware.
From me, my art, thou canst not pass away; / And I, a singer though I cease to sing, / Shall own thee without joy in thee or woe.
Through my indifferent words of every day, / Scattered and all unlinked the rhymes shall ring / And make my poem; and I shall not know.