Art poems
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Epilogue To Tancred And Sigismunda
© James Thomson
Cramm'd to the throat with wholesome moral stuff,
Alas! poor audience! you have had enough.
Was ever hapless heroine of a play
In such a piteous plight as ours to-day?
The Vision Of Piers Plowman - Part 15
© William Langland
Ac after my wakynge it was wonder longe
Er I koude kyndely knowe what was Dowel.
London Crossfigured
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
and the artists on sundays
in the summer
all ‘tracking Nature’
in the suburbs
Mates
© Ada Cambridge
What brains these fragile webs enmesh!
What soaring thought they tie!
What energies of soul and flesh
The Virgin Considered As A Picture
© Edgar Bowers
Her unawed face, whose pose so long assumed
Is touched with what reality we feel,
Bends to itself and, to itself resumed,
Restores a tender fiction to the real.
Silence again
© Helen Hunt Jackson
Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
From “Odi Barbare”
© Geoffrey Hill
xxiv
What is far hence led to the den of making:
Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy
Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem
Digging the Georgics
Friendship and Love
© Mark Akenside
In vain thy lawless Fires contend with mine,
Tho' Crouds unnumber'd fall before thy Shrine;
Let Youths, who ne'er aspir'd to noble Fame,
And the soft Virgin, kindle at thy Flame,
Thee, Son of Indolence and Vice, I scorn,
By Reason nourish'd, and of Virtue born.
Two Sonnets On Fame
© John Keats
I.
Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
To Penshurst
© Benjamin Jonson
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Convict Once - Part First.
© James Brunton Stephens
I.
FREE again! Free again! eastward and westward, before me, behind me,
Wide lies Australia! and free are my feet, as my soul is, to roam!
Oh joy unwonted of space undetermined! No limit assigned me!
Freedom conditioned by nought save the need and desire of a home!
The Death of Antinoüs
© Mark Doty
When the beautiful young man drowned—
accidentally, swimming at dawn
in a current too swift for him,
or obedient to some cult
of total immersion that promised
the bather would come up divine,
To Mr Fashionable Fiancee
© Peter McArthur
I SOMETIMES think it would be sweet
If we were like the olden lovers
The simple-hearted ones we meet
In musty books with vellum covers.
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
The Times
© Charles Churchill
The time hath been, a boyish, blushing time,
When modesty was scarcely held a crime;
Town Eclogues: Wednesday; The Tête à Tête
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
DANCINDA. " NO, fair DANCINDA, no ; you strive in vain
" To calm my care and mitigate my pain ;
" If all my sighs, my cares, can fail to move,
" Ah ! sooth me not with fruitless vows of love."
The Slave Trade, A Poem
© Hannah More
If heaven has into being deign'd to call
Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all;
Town Eclogues: Monday; Roxana or the Drawing-Room
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
ROXANA from the court retiring late,
Sigh'd her soft sorrows at St. JAMES's gate:
Such heavy thoughts lay brooding in her breast,
Not her own chairmen wth more weight opprest;
They groan the cruel load they're doom'd to bear ;
She in these gentler sounds express'd her care.
