Learning poems
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Paradise Regain'd: Book IV (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
PErplex'd and troubl'd at his bad success
The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,
Love Is Enough: Songs I-IX
© William Morris
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
A Death in the Desert
© Robert Browning
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept:
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.
A Happy Childhood
© William Matthews
No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo
My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air
Selective Service
© Carolyn Forche
We rise from the snow where we’ve
lain on our backs and flown like children,
Kaddish
© Allen Ginsberg
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
The Author
© Charles Churchill
Accursed the man, whom Fate ordains, in spite,
And cruel parents teach, to read and write!
A Dream-Song
© George MacDonald
The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the day when the sleepers arise.
(O you mad, you superbly drunk!...)
© Anselm Hollo
I have wasted my days and nights in the company of steady wise neighbors.
Much knowing has turned my hair grey, and much watching has made my sight dim.
For years I have gathered and heaped all scraps and fragments of things;
Crush them and dance upon them, and scatter them all to the winds!
For I know tis the height of wisdom to be drunken and go to the dogs.
The Parting
© Abraham Cowley
As Men in Greenland left beheld the sun
From their horizon run;
And thought upon the sad half-year
Of cold and darkness they must suffer there:
Merry Andrew
© Matthew Prior
A reverend prelate stopp'd his couch-and-six
To laugh a little at our Andrew's tricks:
But when he heard him give this golden rule,
Drive on (he cried) this fellow is no fool.
Song Of The Edinburgh Academician
© James Clerk Maxwell
If ony here has got an ear,
He'd better tak a haud o me,
Or I'll begin, wi roarin din,
To cheer our old Academy.
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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The Deserted Village
© Mark van Doren
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain,
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
H. S. Mauberley (Life and Contacts) [Part I]
© Ezra Pound
E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start i
