Knowledge poems
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In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: [Prelude]
© Alfred Tennyson
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
The Bungalows
© John Ashbery
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
Here And There: Or This World And The Next: Being Suitable Thoughts For A New Year
© Hannah More
Here bliss is short, imperfect, insincere,
But total, absolute, and perfect there.
Parson Turells Legacy
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
OR, THE PRESIDENT'S OLD ARM-CHAIR
A MATHEMATICAL STORY
Prisoners
© Denise Levertov
We taste other food that life,
like a charitable farm-girl,
holds out to us as we pass—
but our mouths are puckered,
a taint of ash on the tongue.
The Talented Man
© Winthrop Mackworth Praed
DEAR Alice! you'll laugh when you know it, --
Last week, at the Duchess's ball,
The Fair Youth Sonnets (18 - 77, 87 - 126)
© William Shakespeare
Comprising the largest grouping of poems, the Fair Youth sonnets are addressed to the same young man in the Procreation Sonnets. But their themes and subjects are more drastically varied.
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An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
© Robert Browning
Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs,
The not-incurious in God's handiwork
Paradise Lost: Book IV
© Patrick Kavanagh
"Which of those rebel Spirits adjudg'd to Hell
Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison? and, transform'd,
Why satt'st thou like an enemy in wait,
Here watching at the head of these that sleep?"
Visitation by Jeffrey Harrison: American Life in Poetry #115 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
Each of the senses has a way of evoking time and place. In this bittersweet poem by Jeffrey Harrison of Massachusetts, birdsong offers reassurance as the speaker copes with loss.
Visitation
An Essay on Man: Epistle I
© Alexander Pope
To Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
What the End Is For
© Jorie Graham
where the heard foams up into the noise of listening,
where the listening arrives without being extinguished.
The huge hum soaks up into the dusk.
The minutes spring open. Six is too many.
From where we watch,
from where even watching is an anachronism,
The Mountain Cemetery
© Edgar Bowers
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.
The Cottager
© John Clare
True as the church clock hand the hour pursues
He plods about his toils and reads the news,
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.
To a Young Writer
© Yvor Winters
Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930
Here for a few short years
Strengthen affections; meet,
Later, the dull arrears
Of age, and be discreet.
Golden State
© Frank Bidart
I
To see my father
lying in pink velvet, a rosary
twined around his hands, rouged,
After Thomas Kempis
© George MacDonald
Who follows Jesus shall not walk
In darksome road with danger rife;
But in his heart the Truth will talk,
And on his way will shine the Life.
