Intelligence poems
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The River Of Rivers In Connecticut
© Wallace Stevens
There is a great river this side of Stygia
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.
Millenial Hymn to Lord Shiva
© Kathleen Raine
Earth no longer
hymns the Creator,
the seven days of wonder,
the Garden is over
At 14 by Don Welch: American Life in Poetry #201 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Don Welch lives in Nebraska and is one of those many talented American poets who have never received as much attention as they deserve. His poems are distinguished by the meticulous care he puts into writing them, and by their deep intelligence. Here is Welch's picture of a 14-year-old, captured at that awkward and painfully vulnerable step on the way to adulthood.
At 14
To be shy,
to lower your eyes
after making a greeting.
The Artist's Duty
© Kenneth Patchen
To verify the irrational
To exaggerate all things
To inhibit everyone
To lubricate each proportion
To experience only experience
On A Gentlewoman's Watch That Wanted A Key
© William Strode
Thou pretty heav'n whose great and lesser spheares
With constant wheelings measure hours and yeares
Last Instructions to a Painter
© Andrew Marvell
Here, Painter, rest a little, and survey
With what small arts the public game they play.
For so too Rubens, with affairs of state,
His labouring pencil oft would recreate.
The Robe of Christ
© Joyce Kilmer
(For Cecil Chesterton)At the foot of the Cross on Calvary
Three soldiers sat and diced,
And one of them was the Devil
And he won the Robe of Christ.
Simplify Me When I'm Dead
© Keith Douglas
As the processes of earth
strip off the colour of the skin:
take the brown hair and blue eye
Mazeppa
© Lord Byron
'Twas after dread Pultowa's day,
When fortune left the royal Swede -
Around a slaughtered army lay,
No more to combat and to bleed.
Roan Stallion
© Robinson Jeffers
She rose at length, she unknotted the halter; she walked and led
the stallion; two figures, woman and stallion,
Came down the silent emptiness of the dome of the hill, under
the cataract of the moonlight.
New Hampshire
© Robert Frost
Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,
One each of everything as in a showcase,
Which naturally she doesn't care to sell.
Dead Man's Dump
© Isaac Rosenberg
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
The Vision Of The Maid Of Orleans - The First Book
© Robert Southey
The plumeless bat with short shrill note flits by,
And the night-raven's scream came fitfully,
Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid
Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank
Leaps, joyful to escape, yet trembling still
In recollection.
AN ELEGY Upon the most Incomparable K. Charles the First
© Henry King
Call for amazed thoughts, a wounded sense
And bleeding Hearts at our Intelligence.
Call for that Trump of Death the Mandrakes Groan
Which kills the Hearers: This befits alone
Of The Nature Of Things: Book IV - Part 03 - The Senses And Mental Pictures
© Lucretius
Bodies that strike the eyes, awaking sight.
From certain things flow odours evermore,
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 Revolution At Market-Hill
© Jonathan Swift
From distant regions Fortune sends
An odd triumvirate of friends;
Where Phoebus pays a scanty stipend,
Where never yet a codling ripen'd:
Perry Zoll
© Edgar Lee Masters
My thanks, friends of the County Scientific Association,
For this modest boulder,
And its little tablet of bronze.
Twice I tried to join your honored body,
