Fear poems
/ page 248 of 454 /
Caroline Chisholm
© Henry Kendall
THE PRIESTS and the Levites went forth, to feast at the courts of the Kings;
They were vain of their greatness and worth, and gladdened with glittering things;
They were fair in the favour of gold, and they walked on, with delicate feet,
Where, famished and faint with the cold, the women fell down in the street.
(“Leave off your works, bride...”)
© Anselm Hollo
Leave off your works, bride. Listen, the guest has come.
Do you hear, he is gently shaking the fastening chain of the door?
Let not your anklets be loud, and your steps be too hurried to meet him.
Leave off your works, bride, the guest has come, in the evening.
For Love
© Robert Creeley
for Bobbie
Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all
Love and Death
© Lord Byron
I watched thee when the foe was at our side,
Ready to strike at himor thee and me,
Were safety hopelessrather than divide
Aught with one loved save love and liberty.
The Bloody Sire
© Robinson Jeffers
It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.
Rubber-Stamp Humour
© Franklin Pierce Adams
If couples mated but for love;
If women all were perfect cooks;
Naucratia; Or Naval Dominion. Part III.
© Henry James Pye
Arm'd in her cause, on Chalgrave's fatal plain,
Where sorrowing Freedom mourns her Hambden slain,
Say, shall the moralizing bard presume
From his proud hearse to tear one warlike plume,
Because a Cæsar or a Cromwell wore
An impious wreath, wet with their country's gore?
The Pains of Sleep
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
To One Of The Author's Children
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
THOU wak'st from happy sleep to play
With bounding heart, my boy!
Before thee lies a long bright day
Of summer and of joy.
For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen
© Hart Crane
There is the world dimensional for
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable ...
Life
© Henry Van Dyke
So let the way wind up the hill or down,
O'er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy:
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy,
New friendship, high adventure, and a crown,
My heart will keep the courage of the quest,
And hope the road's last turn will be the best.
The Death Of Conradin
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
No cloud to dim the splendour of the day
Which breaks o'er Naples and her lovely bay,
And lights that brilliant sea and magic shore
With every tint that charmed the great of yore-
The imperial ones of earth, who proudly bade
Their marble domes e'en Ocean's realm invade.
1994
© Paul Celan
i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when a thumb of ice
stamped itself hard near my heart
Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
© Matthew Arnold
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
Like a Sentence
© John Ashbery
It was prettily said that “No man
hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards
in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . .
The Darned Mounseer
© William Schwenck Gilbert
I shipped, d'ye see, in a Revenue sloop,
And, off Cape Finisteere,
The Departed
© Edgar Albert Guest
IF no one ever went ahead,
If we had seen no friend depart
And mourned him for a while as dead,
How great would be our fear to start.
In The Blue Heaven
© Henry Van Dyke
In the blue heaven the clouds will come and go,
Scudding before the gale, or drifting slow
