Art poems
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Portrait of the Artist
© Dorothy Parker
Oh, lead me to a quiet cell
Where never footfall rankles,
And bar the window passing well,
And gyve my wrists and ankles.
The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam Of Naishapur
© Edward Fitzgerald
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
A Letter from Artemesia in the Town to Chloe in the Country
© John Wilmot
Chloe,In verse by your command I write.
Shortly you'll bid me ride astride, and fight:
These talents better with our sex agree
Than lofty flights of dangerous poetry.
Satyr
© John Wilmot
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare,
A Satyre Against Mankind
© John Wilmot
Thus sir, you see what human nature craves,
Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves;
The difference lies, as far as I can see.
Not in the thing itself, but the degree;
And all the subject matter of debate
Is only, who's a knave of the first rate
Flowering Eucalypt In Autumn
© Les Murray
That slim creek out of the sky
the dried-blood western gum tree
is all stir in its high reaches:
The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
© Les Murray
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
Epistle to Neruda
© Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Superb,
Like a seasoned lion,
Neruda buys bread in the shop.
He asks for it to be wrapped in paper
Memento
© Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Like a reminder of this life
of trams, sun, sparrows,
and the flighty uncontrolledness
of streams leaping like thermometers,
Starlings in Winter
© Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
A Dream of Trees
© Mary Oliver
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
Sand Dabs, Five
© Mary Oliver
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence,
serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but
I'll take it.
The Dance Of Death
© Charles Baudelaire
CARRYING bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.
The Venal Muse
© Charles Baudelaire
You should, to earn your bread today
Like a choir boy with a censer to wave,
Sings hymns with feeling but without belief.
Beauty
© Charles Baudelaire
I AM as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Une Charogne
© Charles Baudelaire
Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux :
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infame
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
© Henry Van Dyke
Dear Aldrich, now November's mellow days
Have brought another Festa round to you,
You can't refuse a loving-cup of praise
From friends the fleeting years have bound to you.
Camma
© Oscar Wilde
And yet - methinks I'd rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken, - come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am grown sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!
The Burden Of Itys
© Oscar Wilde
This English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam
Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
To fleck their blue waves, - God is likelier there
Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks bear!
Athanasia
© Oscar Wilde
To that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught
Of all the great things men have saved from Time,
The withered body of a girl was brought
Dead ere the world's glad youth had touched its prime,
And seen by lonely Arabs lying hid
In the dim womb of some black pyramid.
