Intelligence poems
/ page 9 of 14 /On Reading Crowds and Power
© Geoffrey Hill
1
Cloven, we are incorporate, our wounds
simple but mysterious. We have
some wherewithal to bide our time on earth.
Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge
© André Breton
Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
Intimations Of The Beautiful
© Madison Julius Cawein
The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.
Empty Pitchforks
© Thomas Lux
“There was poverty before money.”
There was debtors’ prison before inmates,
there was hunger prefossil,
At the San Francisco Airport
© Yvor Winters
To my daughter, 1954
This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
The metal glitters, deep and bright.
Great planes are waiting in the yard
They are already in the night.
The Song Of The Sword--To Rudyard Kipling
© William Ernest Henley
The Sword
Singing -
The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword
Clanging imperious
Forth from Time's battlements
His ancient and triumphing Song.
To The Moon Of The South
© Richard Monckton Milnes
Let him go down,--the gallant Sun!
His work is nobly done;
Well may He now absorb
Within his solid orb
The American Way
© Gregory Corso
I am a great American
I am almost nationalistic about it!
I love America like a madness!
But I am afraid to return to America
I’m even afraid to go into the American Express—
A Monumental Column : A Funeral Elegy
© John Webster
To The Right Honourable Sir Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, and One Of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council.
The greatest of the kingly race is gone,
The Recluse - Book First
© William Wordsworth
HOME AT GRASMERE
ONCE to the verge of yon steep barrier came
A roving school-boy; what the adventurer's age
Hath now escaped his memory--but the hour,
The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House
© Howard Nemerov
The painter’s eye follows relation out.
His work is not to paint the visible,
He says, it is to render visible.
Right Apprehension
© Thomas Traherne
Give but to things their true esteem,
And those which now so vile and worthless seem
Modern Love XXX
© George Meredith
What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
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.
O Intelligence Moving The Third Heaven
© Dante Alighieri
O Intelligences moving the third heaven,
the reasons heed that from my heart come forth,
so new, it seems, that no one else should know.
The heaven set in motion by your worth,
Sonnet 86: "Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,"
© William Shakespeare
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,