Fear poems
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Counter-Attack
© Siegfried Sassoon
Wed gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
Sleeping Together
© Katherine Mansfield
Was it a thousand years ago?
I woke in your arms--you were sound asleep--
And heard the pattering sound of sheep.
Softly I slipped to the floor and crept
To the curtained window, then, while you slept,
I watched the sheep pass by in the snow.
The Lovers of the Poor
© Gwendolyn Brooks
arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Valenciennes
© Thomas Hardy
WE trenched, we trumpeted and drummed,
And from our mortars tons of iron hummed
Ath'art the ditch, the month we bombed
The Town o' Valencie?n.
Postponement
© Thomas Hardy
SNOW-BOUND in woodland, a mournful word,
Dropt now and then from the bill of a bird,
Reached me on wind-wafts; and thus I heard,
Wearily waiting:--
The Lacking Sense Scene.--A sad-coloured landscape, Waddon Vale
© Thomas Hardy
"O Time, whence comes the Mother's moody look amid her labours,
As of one who all unwittingly has wounded where she loves?
Why weaves she not her world-webs to according lutes and tabors,
With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face,
As of angel fallen from grace?"
The Alarm
© Thomas Hardy
In a ferny byway
Near the great South-Wessex Highway,
A homestead raised its breakfast-smoke aloft;
The dew-damps still lay steamless, for the sun had made no sky-way,
And twilight cloaked the croft.
Thought Of Ph---a At News Of Her Death
© Thomas Hardy
NOT a line of her writing have I,
Not a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there;
De Profundis
© Thomas Hardy
Wintertime nighs;
But my bereavement-pain
It cannot bring again:
Twice no one dies.
Cardinal Bembo's Epitaph on Raphael
© Thomas Hardy
Here's one in whom Nature feared--faint at such vying -
Eclipse while he lived, and decease at his dying.
She Hears The Storm
© Thomas Hardy
There was a time in former years--
While my roof-tree was his--
When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this!
The Dance At The Phoenix
© Thomas Hardy
To Jenny came a gentle youth
From inland leazes lone;
His love was fresh as apple-blooth
By Parrett, Yeo, or Tone.
The Masked Face
© Thomas Hardy
I found me in a great surging space,
At either end a door,
And I said: "What is this giddying place,
With no firm-fixéd floor,
That I knew not of before?"
"It is Life," said a mask-clad face.
Thoughts Of Phena
© Thomas Hardy
at news of her death Not a line of her writing have I
Not a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there;
The Levelled Churchyard
© Thomas Hardy
"O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
The Sick God
© Thomas Hardy
In days when men had joy of war,
A God of Battles sped each mortal jar;
The peoples pledged him heart and hand,
From Israel's land to isles afar.
To An Unborn Pauper Child
© Thomas Hardy
Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,
And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,
Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here,
And Time-Wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.
Friends Beyond
© Thomas Hardy
WILLIAM Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!
I Said To Love
© Thomas Hardy
I said to Love,
"It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Answers
© Elizabeth Jennings
I keep my answers small and keep them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bulwark to my fear.
