Love poems
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Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order
© John Betjeman
With one consuming roar along the shingle
The long wave claws and rakes the pebbles down
To where its backwash and the next wave mingle,
A mounting arch of water weedy-brown
Against the tide the off-shore breezes blow.
Oh wind and water, this is Felixstowe.
Verses Turned...
© John Betjeman
Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.
An Edwardian Sunday, Broomhill, Sheffield
© John Betjeman
High dormers are rising
So sharp and surprising,
And ponticum edges
The driveways of gravel;
Ireland With Emily
© John Betjeman
Bells are booming down the bohreens,
White the mist along the grass,
Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens
Move between the fields to Mass.
Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican
© John Betjeman
Isn't she lovely, "the Mistress"?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?
The Licorice Fields at Pontefract
© John Betjeman
In the licorice fields at Pontefract
My love and I did meet
And many a burdened licorice bush
Was blooming round our feet;
In A Bath Teashop
© John Betjeman
"Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another
Let us hold hands and look."
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop's ingle-nook.
A Subaltern's Love Song
© John Betjeman
Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!
Christmas
© John Betjeman
The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.
Leaving and Leaving You
© Sophie Hannah
When I leave you postcode and your commuting station,
When I left undone all the things we planned to do
You may feel you have been left by association
But there is leaving and leaving you.
Manteau Three
© Jorie Graham
must it tangles up into a weave,
tied up with votive offerings laws, electricity
what the speakers let loose from their tiny eternity,
what the empty streets held up as offering
when only a bit of wind
litigated in the sycamores,
Le Manteau De Pascal
© Jorie Graham
I have put on my great coat it is cold.It is an outer garment.Coarse, woolen.Of unknown origin. *It has a fine inner lining but it is
as an exterior that you see it a grace. *I have a coat I am wearing. It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions
has made, skillfully, something dark-true,
The Guardian Angel Of The Little Utopia
© Jorie Graham
restless irritations
for? A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness,
the tireless altitudes of the created place,
in which to make a life -- a liberty -- the hollow, fetishized, and starry
To A Friend Going Blind
© Jorie Graham
Today, because I couldn't find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town's entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
Elegy VII
© John Donne
Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love,
And in that sophistry, Oh, thou dost prove
Too subtle: Foole, thou didst not understand
The mystic language of the eye nor hand:
Elegy VI
© John Donne
Oh, let me not serve so, as those men serve
Whom honour's smokes at once fatten and starve;
Poorly enrich't with great men's words or looks;
Nor so write my name in thy loving books
Holy Sonnet XVI: Father, Part Of His Double Interest
© John Donne
Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdom, thy Son gives to me,
His jointure in the knotty Trinity
He keeps, and gives to me his death's conquest.
Elegy II: The Anagram
© John Donne
Marry, and love thy Flavia, for she
Hath all things whereby others beautious be,
For, though her eyes be small, her mouth is great,
Though they be ivory, yet her teeth be jet,
Holy Sonnet VIII: If Faithful Souls Be Alike Glorified
© John Donne
If faithful souls be alike glorified
As angels, then my fathers soul doth see,
And adds this even to full felicity,
That valiantly I hells wide mouth o'erstride:
