Beauty poems
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Niagara
© Daniel Nester
Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters,
I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation—
From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality,
Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . .
Modern Love: II
© George Meredith
It ended, and the morrow brought the task.
Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
Epitaph on Elizabeth, L. H.
© Benjamin Jonson
Wouldst thou hear what man can say
In a little? Reader, stay.
The Erotic Philosophers
© John Betjeman
It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
I Sing the Body Electric
© Walt Whitman
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Gerontion
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
Sonnet: I Scarcely Grieve
© Henry Timrod
I scarcely grieve, O Nature! at the lot
That pent my life within a city’s bounds,
Constantinople
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Greiv'd at a view which strikes vpon my Mind
The short liv'd Vanity of Human kind
In Gaudy Objects I indulge my Sight,
And turn where Eastern Pomp gives gay delight.
Sonnet CIV: To me, fair friend, you never can be old
© William Shakespeare
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Song of the Two Crows
© Hayden Carruth
I sing of Morrisville
(if you call this cry
a song). I
(if you call this painful
To a Young Lady, Netting
© Thomas Love Peacock
While those bewitching hands combine,
With matchless grace, the silken line,
Jordan (I)
© George Herbert
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Movement Song
© Elizabeth Daryush
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
Symphony of a Mexican Garden
© Grace Hazard Conkling
But all across the trudging ragged chords
That are the tangled grasses in the heat,
The mariposa lilies fluttering
Like trills upon some archangelic flute,
Song of the Open Road
© Walt Whitman
1
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
A Poem For Dada Day At The Place April 1, 1958
© Jack Spicer
IV
The bartender is not the United States
Or the intellectual
Or the bartender
He is every bastard that does not cry
When he reads this poem.
