Life poems
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Above The Gaspereau
© Bliss William Carman
How still through the sweet summer sun, through the soft summer rain,
They have stood there awaiting the summons should bid them attain
The freedom of knowledge, the last touch of truth to explain
The great golden gist of their brooding, the marvellous train
Of thought they have followed so far, been so strong to sustain,
The white gospel of sun and the long revelations of rain!
Where the Blue Begins
© Sonia Sanchez
In the southern Adriatic, where the blue begins,
We came to rest awhile and play
My Garden
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I could put my woods in song
And tell what's there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.
Banana Trees by Joseph Stanton: American Life in Poetry #119 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
I'm especially attracted to poems that describe places I might not otherwise visit, in the manner of good travel writing. I'm a dedicated stay-at-home and much prefer to read something fascinating about a place than visit it myself. Here the Hawaii poet, Joseph Stanton, describes a tree that few of us have seen but all of us have eaten from.
Banana Trees
They are tall herbs, really, not trees,
though they can shoot up thirty feet
if all goes well for them. Cut in cross
Invocation to the Social Muse
© Archibald MacLeish
It is true also that we here are Americans:
That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual:
That more people have more thoughts: that there are
And Still It Comes
© Thomas Lux
like a downhill brakes-burned freight train
full of pig iron ingots, full of lead
Drury-lane Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 1747
© Henry James Pye
When Learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes
First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespear rose;
Whence?
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
EERILY the wind doth blow
Through the woodland hollow;
Eërily forlorn and low,
Tremulous echoes follow!
The God Of The Poor
© William Morris
There was a lord that hight Maltete,
Among great lords he was right great,
On poor folk trod he like the dirt,
None but God might do him hurt.
Deus est Deus pauperum.
Elegy VII: Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love
© John Donne
Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love,
And in that sophistry, oh, thou dost prove
Grown about by Fragrant Bushes
© Robert Louis Stevenson
Grown about by fragrant bushes,
Sunken in a winding valley,
The Wanderer: A Vision: Canto III
© Richard Savage
Ye traytors, tyrants, fear his stinging lay!
Ye pow'rs unlov'd, unpity'd in decay!
But know, to you sweet-blossom'd Fame he brings,
Ye heroes, patriots, and paternal kings!
Idyll I. The Death of Daphnis
© Theocritus
GOATHERD.
Shepherd, thy lay is as the noise of streams
Falling and falling aye from yon tall crag.
If for their meed the Muses claim the ewe,
Be thine the stall-fed lamb; or if they choose
The lamb, take thou the scarce less-valued ewe.
Lancelot And Elaine
© Alfred Tennyson
How came the lily maid by that good shield
Of Lancelot, she that knew not even his name?
He left it with her, when he rode to tilt
For the great diamond in the diamond jousts,
Which Arthur had ordained, and by that name
Had named them, since a diamond was the prize.
Hymn to Science
© Mark Akenside
But first with thy resistless light,
Disperse those phantoms from my sight,
Those mimic shades of thee;
The scholiast's learning, sophist's cant,
The visionary bigot's rant,
The monk's philosophy.
Book Of Suleika - Suleika 03
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
ZEPHYR, for thy humid wing,
Oh, how much I envy thee!
The Victory
© Anna Akhmatova
Over a pier, the first beacon inflamed --
The vanguard of other sea-rangers;
The mariner cried and bared his head;
He sailed with death beside and ahead
In seas, packed with furious dangers.
The Exiles Secret
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Why tell each idle guess, each whisper vain?
Enough: the scorched and cindered beams remain.
He came, a silent pilgrim to the West,
Some old-world mystery throbbing in his breast;
Close to the thronging mart he dwelt alone;
He lived; he died. The rest is all unknown.
From the Towers
© Heather McHugh
spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear
