Beauty poems
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Parable of the Hostages
© Louise Gluck
The Greeks are sitting on the beach
wondering what to do when the war ends. No one
The South
© Emma Lazarus
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
Amoretti LV: So oft as I her beauty do behold
© Edmund Spenser
Then needs another element inquire
Whereof she might be made; that is, the sky.
For to the heaven her haughty looks aspire,
And eke her love is pure immortal high.
Then since to heaven ye likened are the best,
Be like in mercy as in all the rest.
Hands
© Robinson Jeffers
Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born
© Charles Lamb
I saw where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
Ode
© Henry Timrod
Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S. C., 1866
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
(I found a few old letters...)
© Anselm Hollo
XIV
I found a few old letters of mine carefully hidden in thy boxa few small toys for thy memory to play with. With a timorous heart thou didst try to steal these trifles from the turbulent stream of time which washes away planets and stars, and didst say, These are only mine! Alas, there is no one now who can claim themwho is able to pay their price; yet they are still here. Is there no love in this world to rescue thee from utter loss, even like this love of thine that saved these letters with such fond care?
O woman, thou camest for a moment to my side and touched me with the great mystery of the woman that there is in the heart of creationshe who ever gives back to God his own outflow of sweetness; who is the eternal love and beauty and youth; who dances in bubbling streams and sings in the morning light; who with heaving waves suckles the thirsty earth and whose mercy melts in rain; in whom the eternal one breaks in two in joy that can contain itself no more and overflows in the pain of love.
Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
Cleanliness
© Charles Lamb
All-endearing Cleanliness,
Virtue next to Godliness,
Easiest, cheapest, needful'st duty,
To the body health and beauty,
Who that's human would refuse it,
When a little water does it?
from The Task, Book I: The Sofa
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere,
Mechanism
© Archie Randolph Ammons
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
© Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;
Dejection: An Ode
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
Song
© Edmund Waller
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
"Who is Silvia?"
© William Shakespeare
Who is Silvia? what is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admirèd be.
Northern Farmer: New Style
© Alfred Tennyson
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy?
Proputty, proputty, proputty—that's what I 'ears 'em saäy.
Proputty, proputty, proputty—Sam, thou's an ass for thy paaïns:
Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs, nor in all thy braaïns.
