Architecture poems
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The Emigrants: Book II
© Charlotte Turner Smith
Scene, on an Eminence on one of those Downs, which afford to the South a view of the Sea; to the North of the Weald of Sussex. Time, an Afternoon in April, 1793.
Victory
© Adrienne Rich
Suddenly instead of art we're eyeing
organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies
cruel blues embroidered purples succinct yellows
a beautiful tumor
From Tamburlaine the Great, Part One ("Nature that framed us of four elements")
© Christopher Marlowe
Nature that framed us of four elements,Warring within our breast for regiment,Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:Our souls, whose faculties can comprehendThe wondrous architecture of the worldAnd measure every wandering planet's course,Still climbing after knowledge infiniteAnd always moving as the restless spheres,Wills us to wear ourselves and never restUntil we reach the ripest fruit of all,That perfect bliss and sole felicity,The sweet fruition of an earthly crown
The Snowstorm
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Nine stages towards Knowing
© Benjamin Jonson
Abstracted in art,
in architecture,
in scholarsÂ’ detail;
Pomegrante
© Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
Let me tell you of the pomegrante; of its juice,
sourish like the juice of green raspberries;
To Revery
© Madison Julius Cawein
What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought,
What walls of bastioned Parian, lucid rose,
In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God : A Hymn Sung as by the Shepherds
© Richard Crashaw
COME, we shepherds whose blest sight
Hath met Love's noon in Nature's night ;
Come lift up our loftier song,
And wake the sun that lies too long.
Hiawatha's Photographing
© Lewis Carroll
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
The Triumph Of Fashion
© Henry James Pye
She spoke, and while her voice the war defy'd,
Assembling myriads croud on every side;
Undaunted to the field of death they go,
And frown amazement on the approaching foe:
With dreadful shock the encount'ring armies meet,
And the plain trembling, rocks beneath their feet.
A Classical Revival
© William Schwenck Gilbert
At the outset I may mention it's my sovereign intention
To revive the classic memories of Athens at its best,
An Urban Convalescence
© James Merrill
As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise, let me try to recall
What building stood here. Was there a building at all?
I have lived on this same street for a decade.
Sion
© George Herbert
Lord, with what glorie wast thou serv'd of old,
When Solomon's temple stood and flourished!
Where most things were of purest gold;
The wood was all embellished
With flowers and carvings mysticall and rare:
All show'd the builder's, crav'd the seer's care.
Ode to Salvador Dali
© Federico Garcia Lorca
A rose in the high garden you desire.
A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.
The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog,
The grays watching over the last balustrades.
Come Si Quando
© Robert Seymour Bridges
How thickly the far fields of heaven are strewn with stars !
Tho* the open eye of day shendeth them with its glare
