Knowledge poems
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Morning of Drunkenness
© Arthur Rimbaud
O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.
Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins.
from The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time
© André Breton
Not uselessly employ'd,
I might pursue this theme through every change
Of exercise and play, to which the year
Did summon us in its delightful round.
An Hymn Of Heavenly Beauty
© Edmund Spenser
Rapt with the rage of mine own ravish'd thought,
Through contemplation of those goodly sights,
from An Explanation of America: A Love of Death
© Robert Pinsky
The child’s heart lightens, tending like a bubble
Towards the currents of the grass and sky,
The pure potential of the clear blank spaces.
Chinese Whispers
© John Ashbery
And in a little while we broke under the strain:
suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
Paradise Regain'd: Book II (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
MEan while the new-baptiz'd, who yet remain'd
At Jordan with the Baptist, and had seen
Gitanjali 35
© Anselm Hollo
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Letter To Sainte-Beuve
© Charles Baudelaire
On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
The Sorcerer: Act I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
For to-day young Alexis-young Alexis Pointdextre
Is betrothed to Aline-to Aline Sangazure,
And that pride of his sex is-of his sex is to be next her
At the feast on the green-on the green, oh, be sure!
The Test of Fantasy
© Joanne Kyger
It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward. All the stories
come folding out. The smells and flowers begin to come back, as
the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded. Rabbits and violets.
Bird Parliament (translation of)
© Edward Fitzgerald
And first, with Heart so full as from his Eyes
Ran weeping, up rose Tajidar the Wise;
The mystic Mark upon whose Bosom show'd
That He alone of all the Birds THE ROAD
Had travell'd: and the Crown upon his Head
Had reach'd the Goal; and He stood forth and said:
The Purgatory Of St. Patrick - Act I
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
KING. Yes, from this rocky height,
Nigh to the sun, that with one starry light
Its rugged brow doth crown,
Headlong among the salt waves leaping down
Let him descend who so much pain perceives;
There let him raging die who raging lives.
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
We have eaten
the blackberries and spat out
the seeds, but they lie
glittering like the eyes of a man.
Love: To A Little Girl
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
When we all lie still
Where churchyard pines their funeral vigil keep,
Laval: Noble Educator
© John Daniel Logan
Lo, now a people learned in all the arts
Greet thee to-day across the distant vale
Of Truth, where dwells obscure the Holy Grail.
And tho they commerce oft upon the marts
Of specious gain, they look beyond the mist
To thee, their first great Educationist.
Bahaman
© Bliss William Carman
To T. B. M.
IN the crowd that thronged the pierhead, come to see their friends take ship
