Learning poems
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Song of the Exposition.
© Walt Whitman
1
AFTER all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free;
Eidólons.
© Walt Whitman
I MET a Seer,
Passing the hues and objects of the world,
The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense, To glean Eidólons.
Put in thy chants, said he,
Solomon To Sheba
© William Butler Yeats
Sang Solomon to Sheba,
And kissed her dusky face,
'All day long from mid-day
We have talked in the one place,
The Song Of The Happy Shepherd
© William Butler Yeats
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Tunbridge Wells
© John Wilmot
At five this morn, when Phoebus raised his head
From Thetis' lap, I raised myself from bed,
And mounting steed, I trotted to the waters
The rendesvous of fools, buffoons, and praters,
Cuckolds, whores, citizens, their wives and daughters.
An Allusion to Horace
© John Wilmot
Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes,
Were stoln, unequal, nay dull many times:
What foolish Patron, is there found of his,
So blindly partial, to deny me this?
The Truro Bear
© Mary Oliver
Theres a bear in the Truro woods.
People have seen it - three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
The Oxford Thrushes
© Henry Van Dyke
I never thought again to hear
The Oxford thrushes singing clear,
Amid the February rain,
Their sweet, indomitable strain.
The Name of France
© Henry Van Dyke
Give us a name to fill the mind
With the shining thoughts that lead mankind,
The glory of learning, the joy of art, --
A name that tells of a splendid part
Humanitad
© Oscar Wilde
It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
Her jealous brother pilfers, but is true
To the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew
Fame's Penny-Trumpet
© Lewis Carroll
Blow, blow your trumpets till they crack,
Ye little men of little souls!
And bid them huddle at your back -
Gold-sucking leeches, shoals on shoals!
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Learning to swim
© Richard Jones
At forty-eight, to be given water,
which is most of the world, given life
in water, which is most of me, given ease,
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
Late, Late, so Late
© Alfred Tennyson
Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill!
Late, late, so late! but we can enter still.
Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now.
Midsummer
© Louise Gluck
On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off ?the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off ?the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.
Soonest Mended
© John Ashbery
Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
[Response to the Loyalty Oath]
© Jack Spicer
We, the Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants of the University of California, wish to register our protest against the new loyalty oath for the following reasons.
1) The testing of a University faculty by oath is a stupid and insulting procedure. If this oath is to have the effect of eliminating Communists from the faculty, we might as logically eliminate murderers from the faculty by forcing every faculty member to sign an oath saying that he has never committed murder.
Making Peace
© Denise Levertov
A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”
Sacred And Profane Love
© Alfred Austin
Profane Love speaks
``I am the Goddess mortals call Profane,
Yet worship me as though I were divine;
Over their lives, unrecognised, I reign,
For all their thoughts are mine.
