We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination (given us to bring down
The choirs of singing angels overshone
By God's clear glory) down our earth to rake
The dismal snows instead, flake following flake,
To cover all the corn; we walk upon
The shadow of hills across a level thrown,
And pant like climbers: near the alder brake
We sigh so loud, the nightingale within
Refuses to sing loud, as else she would.
O brothers, let us leave the shame and sin
Of taking vainly, in a plaintive mood,
The holy name of Grief! - holy herein
That by the grief of One came all our good.
Did you like this poem? Why not receive free classic poems by email? SUBSCRIBE
• A Child Asleep
• A Dead Rose
• A Man's Requirements
• Musical Instrument
• A Sea-Side Walk
• A Thought For A Lonely Death-Bed
• Adequacy
• An Apprehension
• Change Upon Change
• Cheerfulness Taught By Reason
• Comfort
• Consolation
• De Profundis
• Discontent
• Exaggeration
• Futurity
• Grief
• How Do I Love Thee?
• Insufficiency
• Irreparableness
• Lord Walter's Wife
• Minstrelsy
• Pain In Pleasure
• Past And Future
• Patience Taught By Nature
• Perplexed Music
• Substitution
• Tears
• The Autumn
• The Best Thing In The World
• The Deserted Garden
• The House Of Clouds
• The Lady's Yes
• The Landing of Pilgrim Fathers
• The Look
• The Meaning Of The Look
• The Poet And The Bird
• The Prisoner
• The Seraph and Poet
• The Soul's Expression
• The Two Sayings
• The Weakest Thing
• To Flush, My Dog
• Work
• Work And Contemplation
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Frost
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Exaggeration - Poem Lyrics - Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Exaggeration

