Age poems
/ page 86 of 145 /Sharing
© George MacDonald
On the far horizon there
Heaps of cloudy darkness rest;
Though the wind is in the air
There is stupor east and west.
Eclogue 4: Pollio
© Publius Vergilius Maro
Muses of Sicily, essay we now
A somewhat loftier task! Not all men love
Coppice or lowly tamarisk: sing we woods,
Woods worthy of a Consul let them be.
Monte Cassino. Terra Di Lavoro. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fourth)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Beautiful valley! through whose verdant meads
Unheard the Garigliano glides along;--
The Liris, nurse of rushes and of reeds,
The river taciturn of classic song.
Passage
© Hart Crane
Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
Italy : 10. Como
© Samuel Rogers
I love to sail along the Larian Lake
Under the shore -- though not to visit Pliny,
To catch him musing in his plane-tree walk,
Or fishing, as he might be, from his window:
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Genie
© Arthur Rimbaud
He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.
He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life
And we remember him and he travels. . . And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”
He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
Locksley Hall
© Alfred Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
Ultima Thule: The Iron Pen
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I thought this Pen would arise
From the casket where it lies--
Of itself would arise and write
My thanks and my surprise.
The Instruction Manual
© John Ashbery
As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
© Walt Whitman
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Before A Painting By Ayvasovsky
© Hovhannes Toumanian
Rising from ocean, billows uncontrolled,
With heavy flux and reflux, beating high,
Towered up like mountains, roaring terribly;
The wild storm blew with wind gusts manifold
A mad, tempestuous race
Through endless, boundless space.
Our God, Our Help
© Isaac Watts
Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home:
brothers
© Paul Celan
(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)
1
invitation
Since the Cities are the Cities
© Henry Lawson
FOOLS can parrot-cry the prophet when the proof is close at hand,
And the blind can see the danger when the foe is in the land!
Truth was never cynicism, death or ruins not a joke,
Told-you-so is not a warningPatriotism not a croak.
The Harp, And Despair, Of Cowper
© William Lisle Bowles
Sweet bard, whose tones great Milton might approve,
And Shakspeare, from high Fancy's sphere,