Fear poems
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The Enthusiast
© Herman Melville
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him"Shall hearts that beat no base retreat
In youth's magnanimous years -
Ignoble hold it, if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
The Troubadour. Canto 2
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
THE first, the very first; oh! none
Can feel again as they have done;
In love, in war, in pride, in all
The planets of life's coronal,
However beautiful or bright,--
What can be like their first sweet light?
On
© Bob Kaufman
On yardbird corners of embryonic hopes, drowned in a heroin tear.
On yardbird corners of parkerflights to sound filled pockets in space.
On neuro-corners of striped brains & desperate electro-surgeons.
On alcohol corners of pointless discussion & historical hangovers.
The Poet Fears Failure
© Erica Jong
The critic is only doing his job:
keeping the poet lonely.
He barks
like a dog at the door
when the master comes home.
Iris, Her Book
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
I PRAY thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
The Secret
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I
I lay upon my bed in the great night:
The sense of my body drowsed;
But a clearness yet lingered in the spirit,
By soft obscurity housed.
Henry James in the Heart of the City
© Erica Jong
Nothing would surprise him.
The beast in the jungle was what he saw--
Edith Wharton's obfuscating older brother. . .
Dear Colette
© Erica Jong
Dear Colette,
I want to write to you
about being a woman
for that is what you write to me.
Autumn Perspective
© Erica Jong
Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives forward
into the future--as if, when the room
contains us and all our treasured junk
we will have filled whatever gap it is
that makes us wander, discontented
from ourselves.
Costanza
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
She knelt in prayer. A stream of sunset fell
Thro' the stain'd window of her lonely cell,
And with its rich, deep, melancholy glow
Flushing her cheek and pale Madonna brow,
The Christ upon the Hill
© William Cosmo Monkhouse
A couple old sat o'er the fire,
And they were bent and gray;
They burned the charcoal for their Lord,
Who lived long leagues away.
Orpheus
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
What wondrous sound is that, mournful and faint,
But more melodious than the murmuring wind
Which through the columns of a temple glides?
Beachy Head
© Charlotte Turner Smith
ON thy stupendous summit, rock sublime !
That o'er the channel rear'd, half way at sea
Instability of Human Greatness
© Phineas Fletcher
Fond man, that looks on earth for happiness,
And here long seeks what here is never found!
