Edgar Lee Masters: The Hotel Chelsea

The Hotel Chelsea

Edgar Lee Masters

Anita! Soon this Chelsea Hotel
Will vanish before the city’s merchant greed,

Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead

More lofty walls will swell

This old street’s populace. Then who will know

About its ancient grandeur, marble stairs,

Its paintings, onyx-mantels, courts, the heirs

Of a time now long ago?

Who will then know that Mark Twain used to stroll

In the gorgeous dining-room, that princesses,

Poets and celebrated actresses

Lived here and made its soul;

In after years, so often made and unmade

By the changing generations, until today

It stands a tomb of happiness passed away,

Of an era long overlaid?

What loves were lived here, what despairs endured,

What children born here, and what mourners went

Out of its doors, what peace and what lament

These rooms knew, long obscured

Will be more lost when fifty years from hence

The place thereof will have no memory,

When men must hunt its picture, so to see

What it looked like amid this turbulence!

Few now remember even the noted names

That loved its hospitality in past years.

Who will remember me when wrecking shears

Clip like a leaf this room of troubled aims,

And make this window one with the sky’s space,

By which I sat looking into the court?

This table that I write on will not report

My dreams, gone by without a trace.

There will not be a seat for any ghost,

No room left for a musing ghost to smile

On kisses, vows, regrets, that for a while

Made life, and then were lost.

The blue-eyed woman who went out and in

The entrance door, time and the tooth thereof

Will take her, take the man who gave her love,

Both will be lost ere twenty years begin.

With purest love this woman was beloved;

With pain her lover looked upon her grief,

Her past, and strove to give her heart relief,

Himself by Life so moved.

All this will be but currents of the air

Veering and lost. Tell me how souls can be

Such flames of suffering and of ecstasy,

Then fare as the winds fare?

Tell me how love that fills the human heart

With a sense of things eternal must submit

To what is eyeless, and is infinite,

And hears so soon the word ‘depart/”

Anita! You can perpetuate by thought

What we have lived, when this hotel is gone.

Passing its site remember I was one

Who sought for peace and found it not.

Remember that I loved you, scarce could bear

My helplessness to give your spirit thrift –

Remember this as with the tide you drift,

Others will not remember, nor even care

Annabel Lee - Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me. I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love
 I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we
 Of many far wiser than we
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

The Pink Carnation

I may walk until I’m fainting, I may write until I’m blinded,

I might drink until my back teeth are afloat,

But I can’t forget my ruin and the happy days behind it,

When I wore a pink carnation in my coat.



Oh, I thought that time could conquer, and I thought my heart would harden,

But it sends a sudden lump into my throat,

When I think of what I have been, and the cottage and the garden,

When I wore a pink carnation in my coat.



God forgive you, girl, and bless you! Let no line of mine distress you –

I am sorry for the bitter lines I wrote;

But remember, and think kindly, for we met and married blindly,

When I wore a pink carnation in my coat.

Henry Lawson