Beauty poems
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Found Letter by Joshua Weiner: American Life in Poetry #123 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
There is a type of poem, the Found Poem, that records an author's discovery of the beauty that occasionally occurs in the everyday discourse of others. Such a poem might be words scrawled on a wadded scrap of paper, or buried in the classified ads, or on a billboard by the road. The poet makes it his or her poem by holding it up for us to look at. Here the Washington, D.C., poet Joshua Weiner directs us to the poetry in a letter written not by him but to him.
Naples 1860
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I GIVE thee joy!I know to thee
The dearest spot on earth must be
Where sleeps thy loved one by the summer sea;
Sir Walter Scott
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
DEAD!it was like a thunderbolt
To hear that he was dead;
Though for long weeks the words of fear
Came from his dying bed;
Yet hope denied, and would deny
We did not think that he could die.
The Wanderer: A Vision: Canto II
© Richard Savage
What scene of agony the garden brings;
The cup of gall; the suppliant king of kings!
The crown of thorns; the cross, that felt him die;
These, languid in the sketch, unfinish'd lie.
Beauty And The Bird
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
SHE fluted with her mouth as when one sips,
And gently waved her golden head, inclin'd
Genesis BK IV
© Caedmon
(ll. 192-195) Then the Gracious King, Lord of all human kind,
blessed these two, male and female, man and wife, and spake this
word:
Aurora Leigh: Book Seventh
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I broke on Marian there. "Yet she herself,
A wife, I think, had scandals of her own,-
A lover not her husband."
The Origin Of Flattery
© Charlotte Turner Smith
WHEN Jove, in anger to the sons of the earth,
Bid artful Vulcan give Pandora birth,
And sent the fatal gift which spread below
O'er all the wretched race contagious woe,
A Praise Of His Love
© Henry Howard
Give place, ye lovers, here before
That spent your boasts and brags in vain;
My lady's beauty passeth more
The best of yours, I dare well sayn,
Than doth the sun the candle-light,
Or brightest day the darkest night.
The Pleasures of Memory - Part II.
© Samuel Rogers
Sweet Memory, wafted by thy gentle gale,
Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail,
To view the fairy-haunts of long-lost hours.
Blest with far greener shades, far fresher flowers.
Tannhauser
© Emma Lazarus
Far into Wartburg, through all Italy,
In every town the Pope sent messengers,
Riding in furious haste; among them, one
Who bore a branch of dry wood burst in bloom;
The pastoral rod had borne green shoots of spring,
And leaf and blossom. God is merciful.
From The Italian Of Michael Angelo
© William Wordsworth
YES! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,
And I be undeluded, unbetrayed;
For if of our affections none finds grace
In sight of Heaven, then, wherefore hath God made
Burns
© John Greenleaf Whittier
No more these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover;
Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.
A Dream Of Venice
© Ada Cambridge
Numb, half asleep, and dazed with whirl of wheels,
And gasp of steam, and measured clank of chains,
Marmion: Introduction to Canto II.
© Sir Walter Scott
But chief 'twere sweet to think such life
(Though but escape from fortune's strife),
Something most matchless good and wise,
A great and grateful sacrifice;
And deem each hour to musing given
A step upon the road to heaven.
Mont Brevent
© George Santayana
O dweller in the valley, lift thine eyes
To where, above the drift of cloud, the stone
The Forest Sanctuary - Part II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Ave, sanctissima!
'Tis night-fall on the sea;
Ora pro nobis!
Our souls rise to thee!
The Mermaid
© George MacDonald
Up cam the tide wi' a burst and a whush,
And back gaed the stanes wi' a whurr;
The king's son walkit i' the evenin hush,
To hear the sea murmur and murr.
