Great poems
/ page 445 of 549 /Search for Truth
© David Herbert Lawrence
Search for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.
Santa Decca
© Oscar Wilde
Some God lies hidden in the asphodel.
Ah Love! if such there be then it were well
For us to fly his anger: nay, but see
The leaves are stirring: let us watch a-while.
The Witch's Frolic
© Richard Harris Barham
Thou mayest have read, my little boy Ned,
Though thy mother thine idlesse blames,
In Doctor Goldsmith's history book,
Of a gentleman called King James,
In quilted doublet, and great trunk breeches,
Who held in abhorrence tobacco and witches.
How Beastly The Bourgeois Is
© David Herbert Lawrence
Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing
The Elephant Is Slow To Mate
© David Herbert Lawrence
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
The Me Within Thee Blind!
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Since God is lost, then all is lost indeed.
You did not know the comfort or the need
Of God for me, who am so frail and weak.
Blown by all winds, I know not where to seek.
The Piano (Notebook Version)
© David Herbert Lawrence
The full throated woman has chosen a winning, living song
And surely the heart that is in me must belong
To the old Sunday evenings, when darkness wandered outside
And hymns gleamed on our warm lips, as we watched mother's fingers glide
The Ship of Death
© David Herbert Lawrence
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
Whales Weep Not!
© David Herbert Lawrence
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!
Piano
© David Herbert Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
The Fugitive. (Tartar Song, From The Prose Version Of Chodzko)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I.
"He is gone to the desert land
I can see the shining mane
Of his horse on the distant plain,
As he rides with his Kossak band!
Snake
© David Herbert Lawrence
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
The Two Birth Nights
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Bright glittering lights are gleaming in yonder mansion proud,
And within its walls are gathered a gemmed and jewelled crowd;
Robes of airy gauze and satin, diamonds and rubies bright,
Rich festoons of glowing flowerstruly tis a wondrous sight.
Zoheyr
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Woe is me for 'Ommi 'Aufa! Woe for the tents of her
lost on thy stony plain, Durráj, on thine, Mutethéllemi!
In Rákmatéyn I found our dwelling, faint lines how desolate,
tent--markstraced like the vein--tracings blue on the wrists of her.
Portrait Number Five: Against A New York Summer
© Jack Gilbert
I'd walk her home after work
buying roses and talking of Bechsteins.
She was full of soul.
Her small room was gorged with heat
Maud II
© Alfred Tennyson
O that 'twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
In Umbria
© Jack Gilbert
Once upon a time I was sitting outside the cafe
watching twilight in Umbria when a girl came
out of the bakery with the bread her mother wanted.
She did not know what to do. Already bewildered
The Great Fires
© Jack Gilbert
Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
Gathering Leaves
© Robert Frost
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.