Experience poems
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Forehead of the Rose
© René Char
Despite the open window in the room of long absence, the odor of the rose is still linked with the
breath that was there. Once again we are without previous experience, newcomers, in love. The
rose! The field of its ways would dispel even the effrontery of death. No grating stands in the way.
Desire is alive, an ache in our vaporous foreheads.
Paradise Regain'd: Book III (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
SO spake the Son of God, and Satan stood
A while as mute confounded what to say,
The Recluse - Book First
© William Wordsworth
HOME AT GRASMERE
ONCE to the verge of yon steep barrier came
A roving school-boy; what the adventurer's age
Hath now escaped his memory--but the hour,
Paradise Lost: Book IX (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
To whom the Virgin Majestie of Eve,
As one who loves, and some unkindness meets,
With sweet austeer composure thus reply'd,
Whispers of Immortality
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Right Apprehension
© Thomas Traherne
Give but to things their true esteem,
And those which now so vile and worthless seem
The Snowmass Cycle
© Stephen Dunn
If the rich are casually cruel
perhaps its because
they can stare at the sky
and never see an indictment
in the shape of clouds.
The Dream
© Caroline Norton
Ah! bless'd are they for whom 'mid all their pains
That faithful and unalter'd love remains;
Who, Life wreck'd round them,--hunted from their rest,--
And, by all else forsaken or distress'd,--
Claim, in one heart, their sanctuary and shrine--
As I, my Mother, claim'd my place in thine!
The Resolution
© Mary Barber
The Favours of Fortune I once hop'd to gain,
And often invok'd her, but ever in vain.
She despis'd my Addresses, which gave me such Grief,
I flew to the Muses, in Hopes of Relief.
The Idols
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I.2
The Forests of the Night awaken blind in heat
Of black stupor; and stirring in its deep retreat,
I hear the heart of Darkness slowly beat and beat.
OEnone
© Alfred Tennyson
"Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm
Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold,
That smelt ambrosially, and while I look'd
And listen'd, the full-flowing river of speech
Came down upon my heart.
The Ghost of Heaven
© Carolyn Forche
Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,
a child herself with child,
for whom we searched
... by an Earthquake
© John Ashbery
A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.
A dies of psychic shock.
Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”
To a Young Poet
© Mahmoud Darwish
Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.
The Paleontologist’s Blind Date by Philip Memmer : American Life in Poetry #240 Ted Kooser, U.
© Ted Kooser
We haven’t shown you many poems in which the poet enters another person and speaks through him or her, but it is, of course, an effective and respected way of writing. Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N.Y., enters the persona of a young woman having an unpleasant experience with a blind date.
The Paleontologist’s Blind Date
The Larks Nest
© Charlotte Turner Smith
"TRUST only to thyself;" the maxim's sound;
For, tho' life's choicest blessing be a friend,
The Lovers Secret
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Bravo, Annex!" they shouted, every one,--
"Not Mrs. Kemble's self had better done."
"Quite so," she stammered in her awkward way,--
Not just the thing, but something she must say.
