Happy poems
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Paradise Regain'd: Book I (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
I Who e're while the happy Garden sung,
By one mans disobedience lost, now sing
Phrases
© Arthur Rimbaud
When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes—to a beach for two faithful children—to a musical house for our clear understanding—then I shall find you.
When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.
When I have realized all your memories, —when I am the girl who can tie your hands,—then I will stifle you.
God Hides His People
© William Cowper
To lay the soul that loves him low,
Becomes the Onlywise:
To hide beneath a veil of woe,
The children of the skies.
Love Is Enough: Songs I-IX
© William Morris
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV
© Alexander Pope
Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul,
Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start ev'n from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at—perhaps a Stowe.
A Happy Childhood
© William Matthews
No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo
My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air
Have You Prayed?
© Li-Young Lee
When the wind
turns and asks, in my father’s voice,
Have you prayed?
In Imitation of Dr. Swift : The Happy Life of a Country Parson
© Alexander Pope
Parson, these things in thy possessing
Are better than the Bishop's blessing.
Aeneid, II, 692 - end
© Virgil
As he spoke we could hear, ever more loudly, the noise
Of the burning fires; the flood of flames was coming
To Asra
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Are there two things, of all which men possess,
That are so like each other and so near,
To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible
© Bliss William Carman
Germ of new life, whose powers expanding slow
For many a moon their full perfection wait,—
Haste, precious pledge of happy love, to go
Auspicious borne through life's mysterious gate.
The Candle Of The Lord
© Ada Cambridge
Our spirit-ay, our own!-the tree whose fruits
Have never fail'd-the sign upon the door
'Twixt us and God's intelligent dumb brutes,
That parts us evermore!
The Lovers' Walk
© Roderic Quinn
BY the slowly flowing river
Lies the old, shadowed walk,
Where the lovers, two and two,
Ere the falling of the dew,
Sonnet XXV
© George Santayana
As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
Laus Veneris
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly — fairer for a fleck.
The Condemned
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
AS in those lands of mighty mountain heights,
The streams, by sudden tempests overcharged,
Sweep down the slopes, hearing swift ruin with them,
So I and all my fortunes were engulf'd
Kaddish
© Allen Ginsberg
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!
