Love poems
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The School Where I Studied
© John Wesley
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
Song: A youth for Jane with ardour sighed...
© Amelia Opie
A youth for Jane with ardour sighed,
The maid with sparkling eye;
But to his vows she still replied,
Ill hear you by and by.
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
Smokers of Paper
© Cesare Pavese
He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner
mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins.
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Sonnets from the Portuguese 7: The Face
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Somebody Trying
© Denise Levertov
‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed.
‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’
Something about his brother dying.
Rivers and Mountains
© John Ashbery
On the secret map the assassins
Cloistered, the Moon River was marked
Crows in a Strong Wind
© Cornelius Eady
Off go the crows from the roof.
The crows can’t hold on.
They might as well
Be perched on an oil slick.
The Breather
© Billy Collins
Just as in the horror movies
when someone discovers that the phone calls
are coming from inside the house
Funeral Music
© Geoffrey Hill
William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483
Bereavement
© William Lisle Bowles
Whose was that gentle voice, that, whispering sweet,
Promised methought long days of bliss sincere!
America
© Walt Whitman
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
Sapphics
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
© Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;
Dejection: An Ode
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
