Beauty poems
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The Wild Swans at Coole
© William Butler Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
© Edwin Muir
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
The Pet-Lamb
© William Wordsworth
THE dew was falling fast, the stars began to blink;
I heard a voice; it said, "Drink, pretty creature, drink!"
And, looking o'er the hedge, before me I espied
A snow-white mountain-lamb with a Maiden at its side.
Our Casuarina Tree
© Toru Dutt
LIKE a huge Python, winding round and round
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,
The Princess: O Swallow
© Alfred Tennyson
O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.
Solace
© Dorothy Parker
There was a rose that faded young;
I saw its shattered beauty hung
Upon a broken stem.
I heard them say, "What need to care
With roses budding everywhere?"
I did not answer them.
from The Shepheardes Calender: April
© Edmund Spenser
THENOT & HOBBINOLL
Tell me good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?
What? hath some Wolfe thy tender Lambes ytorne?
Or is thy Bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete?
Or art thou of thy loved lasse forlorne?
The First Part: Sonnet 1 - In my first years, and prime yet not at height
© William Henry Drummond
In my first years, and prime yet not at height,
When sweet conceits my wits did entertain,
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
The Rest
© Ezra Pound
Artists broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against,
To Mrs. Strangeways Horner, With A Letter From My Son;
© Mary Barber
Methinks, I see your Friendship rise,
And sparkle in your lovely Eyes.
Your Heir! (I hear you now repeat)
I long to know of your Estate.
Say--Is it an Hibernian Bog,
Where Phoebus seldom shines for Fog?
Peach Blooms
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O! tenderly beautiful, beyond compare,
Flushed from pale pink to deepest rosebud hue--
Nurslings of tranquil sunshine and mild air,
Of shadowless dawn, and silvery twilight dew--
Ye blush and burn, as if your flickering grace
Were love's own tint on Spring's enamored face!
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
To Delia
© William Cowper
Me to whatever state the gods assign,
Believe, my love, whatever state be mine,
Mabel Martin
© John Greenleaf Whittier
PROEM.
I CALL the old time back: I bring my lay
in tender memory of the summer day
When, where our native river lapsed away,
Freely Espousing
© James Schuyler
a semi-tropic night
that cast the blackest shadow
of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf
