Fear poems
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The Disabled Debauchee
© John Wilmot
As some brave admiral, in former war
Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
Two rival fleets appearing from afar,
Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill;
Sonnet CXXVI: O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy powr
© William Shakespeare
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy powr
Dost hold times fickle glass his sickle hour,
Modern Love: IX
© George Meredith
He felt the wild beast in him betweenwhiles
So masterfully rude, that he would grieve
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
The Apparition
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
(A Retrospect)
Convulsions came; and, where the field
Long slept in pastoral green,
A goblin-mountain was upheaved
(Sure the scared sense was all deceived),
Marl-glen and slag-ravine.
The Two Children
© Emily Jane Brontë
Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away;
Light Night
© James Schuyler
Stoop, dove, horrid maid,
spread your chiffon on our
wood rot breeding the
Destroying Angel, white,
lathe-shapely, trout-lily
lovely. Taste, and have it.
Joy in the Woods
© Claude McKay
There is joy in the woods just now,
The leaves are whispers of song,
Advice to a Prophet
© Lola Ridge
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
The Haunted Oak
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
© Gwendolyn Brooks
He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat
Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat
And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed.
