Beauty poems
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In an Old Town Garden
© Lucy Maud Montgomery
Shut from the clamor of the street
By an old wall with lichen grown,
It holds apart from jar and fret
A peace and beauty all its own.
Down Stream
© Lucy Maud Montgomery
Comrades, up! Let us row down stream in this first rare dawnlight,
While far in the clear north-west the late moon whitens and wanes;
Before us the sun will rise, deep-purpling headland and islet,
It is well to meet him thus, with the life astir in our veins!
An Autumn Evening
© Lucy Maud Montgomery
Dark hills against a hollow crocus sky
Scarfed with its crimson pennons, and below
The dome of sunset long, hushed valleys lie
Cradling the twilight, where the lone winds blow
And wake among the harps of leafless trees
Fantastic runes and mournful melodies.
Take This Waltz
© Leonard Cohen
(After Lorca)
Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry.
Story Of Isaac
© Leonard Cohen
The door it opened slowly,
my father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
I'm Your Man
© Leonard Cohen
If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you
First We Take Manhattan
© Leonard Cohen
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
Dance Me To The End Of Love
© Leonard Cohen
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
The Lily In A Crystal
© Robert Herrick
You have beheld a smiling rose
When virgins' hands have drawn
O'er it a cobweb-lawn:
And here, you see, this lily shows,
Upon A Maid
© Robert Herrick
Here she lies, in bed of spice,
Fair as Eve in paradise;
For her beauty, it was such,
Poets could not praise too much.
The Widows' Tears; Or, Dirge Of Dorcas
© Robert Herrick
Come pity us, all ye who see
Our harps hung on the willow-tree;
Come pity us, ye passers-by,
Who see or hear poor widows' cry;
To The Handsome Mistress Grace Potter
© Robert Herrick
As is your name, so is your comely face
Touch'd every where with such diffused grace,
As that in all that admirable round,
There is not one least solecism found;
And as that part, so every portion else
Keeps line for line with beauty's parallels.
An Epitaph Upon A Virgin
© Robert Herrick
Here a solemn fast we keep,
While all beauty lies asleep;
Hushed be all things, no noise here,
But the toning of a tear,
Or the sigh of such as bring
Cowslips for her covering.
The Definition Of Beauty
© Robert Herrick
Beauty no other thing is, than a beam
Flash'd out between the middle and extreme.
Working Girls
© Carl Sandburg
THE working girls in the morning are going to work--
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
Trafficker
© Carl Sandburg
Among the shadows where two streets cross,
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
Smiling a broken smile from a face
Sumach and Birds
© Carl Sandburg
IF you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple
Shining in the six oclock September dusk:
If the red sumach on the autumn roads
Never danced on the flame of your eyelashes:
Soiled Dove
© Carl Sandburg
Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she
married a corporation lawyer who picked her from
a Ziegfeld chorus.
Before then she never took anybody's money and paid
Last Answers
© Carl Sandburg
I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
