Beauty poems

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At a Symphony

© Louise Imogen Guiney

Oh, I would have these tongues oracular

Dip into silence, tease no more, let be!

'Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail
Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale:
From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,
And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from Heaven,

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.

On a Dead Child

© John Hall Wheelock

Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,
With promise of strength and manhood full and fair!
Though cold and stark and bare,
The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee.

Town Eclogues: Saturday; The Small-Pox

© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

FLAVIA. THE wretched FLAVIA on her couch reclin'd,
Thus breath'd the anguish of a wounded mind ;
A glass revers'd in her right hand she bore,
For now she shun'd the face she sought before.

Coquette And Her Lover

© Paul Hamilton Hayne

O, foolish querist! what if I,
Beholding your enamored face
And every well-attested trace
Of verdant, young idolatry,
Should, after my own fashion, choose
To play the subtly-amorous muse,

"Those must be masts of ships the gazer sees"

© Lesbia Harford

Those must be masts of ships the gazer sees
On through the little gap in the park trees
So far away that seeing almost fails.
Those must be masts, the lovely masts of ships

Sonnet III

© Caroline Norton

THE FORNARINA.
AND bless'd was she thou lovedst, for whose sake
Thy wit did veil in fanciful disguise
The answer which thou wert compell'd to make

Song

© George Darley

Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,

Lull'd by the faint breezes sighing through her hair;

Sunflower Sutra

© Allen Ginsberg

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

Questions Of Life

© John Greenleaf Whittier

A bending staff I would not break,
A feeble faith I would not shake,
Nor even rashly pluck away
The error which some truth may stay,
Whose loss might leave the soul without
A shield against the shafts of doubt.

Through a Glass Eye, Lightly

© John Betjeman

In the laboratory waiting room

containing

"Needs must I sing"

Lady, relent: thou whom all gifts adorn,
Who dost all worth and every grace display,
More than all other dames that e'er were born,
And give me kindly succour, since you may.

Spring Night

The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,
The drowsy lights along the paths
Are dim and pearled.

Eight Variations

© Weldon Kees

1.
Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns,
But that was quite some time ago.
Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs,
Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.

The Song Of The Sword--To Rudyard Kipling

The Sword
Singing -
The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword
Clanging imperious
Forth from Time's battlements
His ancient and triumphing Song.

The Dance

© Gary Snyder

“Against its will, energy is doing something productive, like the devil in medieval history. The principle is that nature does something against its own will and, by self-entanglement, produces beauty.” Otto Rössler

Izanami