Mom poems
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Adam’s Curse
© William Butler Yeats
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
Palladium
© Matthew Arnold
Set where the upper streams of Simois flow
Was the Palladium, high 'mid rock and wood;
And Hector was in Ilium, far below,
And fought, and saw it not-but there it stood!
To The Moon Of The South
© Richard Monckton Milnes
Let him go down,--the gallant Sun!
His work is nobly done;
Well may He now absorb
Within his solid orb
The House of Life: 97. A Superscription
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that wing'd Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,—
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.
The Mirror
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I
Where is all the beauty that hath been?
Where the bloom?
Dust on boundless wind? Grass dropt into fire?
Orpheus Alone
© Mark Strand
It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk
On the shores of the darkest known river,
Bricks and Straw
© Edwin Morgan
My desk is cleared of the litter of ages;
Before me glitter the fair white pages;
The Pleasures of Imagination: Book The Second
© Mark Akenside
Till all its orbs and all its worlds of fire
Be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene,
The unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck;
And ever stronger as the storms advance,
Firm through the closing ruin holds his way,
Where nature calls him to the destin'd goal.
The Nails
© William Stanley Merwin
I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall
Like a calendar in one color.
from The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge
© Hart Crane
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Burns
© Fitz-Greene Halleck
WILD ROSE of Alloway! my thanks:
Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon
When first we met upon "the banks
And braes o'bonny Doon."
Lines In Memory Of Edmund Morris
© Duncan Campbell Scott
How shall we transmit in tendril-like images,
The tenuous tremor in the tissues of ether,
Before the round of colour buds like the dome of a shrine,
The preconscious moment when love has fluttered in the bosom,
Before it begins to ache?
The Recluse - Book First
© William Wordsworth
HOME AT GRASMERE
ONCE to the verge of yon steep barrier came
A roving school-boy; what the adventurer's age
Hath now escaped his memory--but the hour,
The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House
© Howard Nemerov
The painter’s eye follows relation out.
His work is not to paint the visible,
He says, it is to render visible.
The Image In Lava
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Thou thing of years departed!
What ages have gone by,
Since here the mournful seal was set
By love and agony!
The Bard
© Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky
My friends, can you descry that mound of earth
Above clear waters in the shade of trees?
Nostalgia
© Billy Collins
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
Fresh Air
© Kenneth Koch
3
Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.”
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney
Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle,
But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea.
