Great poems
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The Gyres
© William Butler Yeats
THE GYRES! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
A Reading Of Life--With The Persuader
© George Meredith
So is it sung in any space
She fills, with laugh at shallow laws
Forbidding love's devised embrace,
The music Beauty from it draws.
Complaint Of Body, The Ass, Against His Rider, The Soul
© Stephen Vincent Benet
BODY
Well, here we go!
The Times
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
The times are not degenerate. Man's faith
Mounts higher than of old. No crumbling creed
Celestial Music
© Louise Gluck
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.
Under The Pressure Of Violent Anguish
© Robert Burns
O Thou Great Being! what Thou art,
Surpasses me to know;
Yet sure I am, that known to Thee
Are all Thy works below.
In The Carlyle House, Chelsea
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Up the steep stair they clatter to each room,
In whispered merriment they pierce the gloom
Of Time's sweet mercy, who with his grey sheet
Did seek in vain to stay their restless feet.
Their peeping eyes and prying fingers' thrust
Disturb Death's shroud and wanton in the dust.
He Wonders Whether To Praise Or To Blame Her
© Rupert Brooke
I have peace to weigh your worth, now all is over,
But if to praise or blame you, cannot say.
For, who decries the loved, decries the lover;
Yet what man lauds the thing he's thrown away?
Science
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Alone I climb the steep ascending path
Which leads to knowledge. In the babbling throngs
The Wild Iris
© Louise Gluck
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
The Chameleon
© Matthew Prior
But if at first he minds his hits,
And drinks Champaigne among the wits,
Five deep he toasts the towering lasses,
Repeats yon verse wrote on glasses:
Is in the chair, prescribes the law,
And lies with those he never saw.
Channing
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Not vainly did old poets tell,
Nor vainly did old genius paint
God's great and crowning miracle,
The hero and the saint!
Odysseus' Decision
© Louise Gluck
The great man turns his back on the island.
Now he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time
The Easter Decorations
© Ada Cambridge
O take away your dried and painted garlands!
The snow-cloth's fallen from each quicken'd brow,
The stone's rolled off the sepulchre of winter,
And risen leaves and flowers are wanted now.
Inferno Canto02
© Dante Alighieri
Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aere bruno
toglieva li animai che sono in terra
da le fatiche loro; e io sol uno
Inferno Canto03
© Dante Alighieri
Per me si va ne la citt? dolente,
per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente .
There is a Gentle Thought
© Dante Alighieri
There is a gentle thought that often springs
to life in me, because it speaks of you.
Its reasoning about loves so sweet and true,
the heart is conquered, and accepts these things.
Sestina
© Dante Alighieri
I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow,
to the short day and to the whitening hills,
when the colour is all lost from the grass,
though my desire will not lose its green,
so rooted is it in this hardest stone,
that speaks and feels as though it were a woman.
