All Poems
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Sojourns in the Parallel World
© Denise Levertov
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
A Fuedal Picture
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WITH what a grace she passed us by just now!
Her delicate chin half raised, her cordial brow
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
© Denise Levertov
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
Electra On Azalea Path
© Sylvia Plath
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
The True Man
© Edgar Albert Guest
This is the sort of a man was he:
True when it hurt him a lot to be;
Tight in a corner an' knowin' a lie
Would have helped him out, but he wouldn't buy
His freedom there in so cheap a way--
He told the truth though he had to pay.
The Elves
© Denise Levertov
Elves are no smaller
than men, and walk
as men do, in this world,
but with more grace than most,
and are not immortal.
St. Peter and the Angel
© Denise Levertov
Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom he was chained--
I Leave Thee for Awhile
© Eliza Cook
I leave thee for awhile, my love, I leave thee with a sigh;
The fountain spring within my soul is playing in mine eye;
I do not blush to own the tear,--let, let it touch my cheek,
And what my lip has failed to tell, that drop perchance may speak.
Mavourneen! when again I seek my green isle in the West,
Oh, promise thou wilt share my lot, and set this heart at rest.
Stepping Westward
© Denise Levertov
What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
The Liberator
© Emily Holmes Coleman
Keys turning
rattling in the loose locks
opening high the doors
that close again
like death-hours coming faster
The Well
© Denise Levertov
At sixteen I believed the moonlight
could change me if it would.
I moved my head
on the pillow, even moved my bed
as the moon slowly
crossed the open lattice.
The White Evening
© Madison Julius Cawein
From gray, bleak hills 'neath steely skies
Thro' beards of ice the forests roar;
Along the river's humming shore
The skimming skater bird-like flies.
Zeroing In
© Denise Levertov
"I am a landscape," he said,
"a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
and plains glad in their way
If I Forget Thee
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
If I forget thee! How shall I forget thee?
Sword of the mighty! Prince and Lord of War!
Captive I bind me
To the spears that blind me,
Rage in my heart and love for evermore.
On a Theme by Thomas Merton
© Denise Levertov
"Adam, where are you?"
God's hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.
Sonnet. To A Lady Seen For A Few Moments At Vauxhall
© John Keats
Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb,
Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand,
Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web,
And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.
The Rainwalkers
© Denise Levertov
An old man whose black face
shines golden-brown as wet pebbles
under the streetlamp, is walking two mongrel dogs of dis-
proportionate size, in the rain,
in the relaxed early-evening avenue.
In Memory Of Charles Wentworth Upham, Jr.
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HE was all sunshine; in his face
The very soul of sweetness shone;
Fairest and gentlest of his race;
None like him we can call our own.
The Great Black Heron
© Denise Levertov
Since I stroll in the woods more often
than on this frequented path, it's usually
trees I observe; but among fellow humans
what I like best is to see an old woman
