Beauty poems
/ page 195 of 313 /
The Usurper
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
FOR weeks the languid southern wind had blown,
Fraught with Floridian balm; thro' winter skies
We seemed to catch the smile of April's eyes;
A queenly waif, from her far temperate zone
The Passing Show
© Ambrose Bierce
I
I know not if it was a dream. I viewed
A city where the restless multitude,
Between the eastern and the western deep
Had reared gigantic fabrics, strong and rude.
George Moore
© Marianne Clarke Moore
So far as the future is concerned,
Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher,
How is one to know what one doesnt know?
So far as the present is concerned,
Poems
© Anselm Hollo
i
thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
ii
Lux In Tenebris
© George Essex Evans
So set they discord in the sweetest singing,
And a sharp thorn about the fairest rose;
And doubt around the cross where faith was clinging,
And fear to haunt the regions of repose;
And dimmed mens eyes, so that they should not see,
Like Gods, the vistas of futurity.
Follow Thy Fair Sun
© Thomas Campion
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night
And she made all of light,
Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow.
English Eclogues I - The Old Mansion-House
© Robert Southey
STRANGER.
Old friend! why you seem bent on parish duty,
Breaking the highway stones,--and 'tis a task
Somewhat too hard methinks for age like yours.
In The Gardens Of Shushan
© Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall
BE pitiful ! Her lips have touched this cool
Clear stream that sets the long green leaves astir.
The very doves that dream beside the pool
Sang their soft notes to her.
Drowned at Sea
© Henry Kendall
Gloomy cliffs, so worn and wasted with the washing of the waves,
Are ye not like giant tombstones round those lonely ocean graves?
Never Love Unless
© Thomas Campion
Never love unless you can
Bear with all the faults of man:
Men sometimes will jealous be
Though but little cause they see;
And hang the head, as discontent,
And speak what straight they will repent.
City Without a Name
© Czeslaw Milosz
1
Who will honor the city without a name
If so many are dead and others pan gold
Or sell arms in faraway countries?
Attainment
© Madison Julius Cawein
ON the Heights of Great Endeavour,
Where Attainment looms forever,
Proem
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I LOVE the old melodious lays
Which softly melt the ages through,
The songs of Spensers golden days,
Arcadian Sidneys silvery phrase,
Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew.
Sonnet 17: Who will believe my verse in time to come
© William Shakespeare
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Sweet Death
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
The sweetest blossoms die.
And so it was that, going day by day
To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris
© Helen Maria Williams
What crowding thoughts around me wake,
What marvels in a Christmas-cake!
Walking
© Thomas Traherne
To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
Else may the silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good
Nor joy nor glory meet.
Beauty
© Tony Hoagland
When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.
