Mom poems
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Saint Maura: A.D. 304
© Charles Kingsley
Thank God! Those gazers' eyes are gone at last!
The guards are crouching underneath the rock;
How to Make a Memory
© Robert Laurence Binyon
The rain was ending, and light
Lifting the leaden skies.
It shone upon ceiling and floor
And dazzled a childs eyes.
I Loved Thee
© Alexander Pushkin
I loved thee; and perchance until this moment
Within my breast is smouldering still the fire!
Yet I would spare thy pain the least renewal,
Nothing shall rouse again the old desire!
Thunder On The Downs
© Robert Laurence Binyon
And if a lightning now were loosed in flame
Out of the darkness of the cloud to claim
Thy heart, O England, how wouldst thou be known
In that hour? How to the quick core be shown
And seen? What cry should from thy very soul
Answer the judgment of that thunder--roll?
Autumn Plaint
© Stéphane Mallarme
Since Maria left me to go to another star - which one, Orion, Altair - or
you green Venus? - I have always loved solitude. How many long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit. I can say then that I have passed long days alone with my cat and alone with one of the last authors of the Roman decadence; for since the white creature is no more I have loved, uniquely and strangely, everything summed up in the word: fall. So, in the year, my favourite season is the last slow part of summer that just precedes autumn, and, in the day, the hour when I walk is when the sun hesitates before vanishing, with rays of yellow bronze over the grey walls, and rays of red copper over the tiles. Literature, also, from which my spirit asks voluptuousness, that will be the agonised poetry of Romes last moments, so long as it does not breathe a breath of the reinvigorated stance of the Barbarians or stammer in childish Latin like Christian prose. I was reading then one of those dear poems (whose flakes of rouge have more charm for me than young flesh), and dipping a hand into the pure animal fur, when a street organ sounded languishingly and sadly under my window. It was playing in the great alley of poplars whose leaves, even in spring, seem mournful to me since Maria passed by them, on her last journey, lying among candles. The instrument of sadnesses, yes, certainly: the piano flashes, the violin gives off light from its torn fibres, but the street organ in memorys half-light made me dream despairingly. Now it murmured a delightfully common song that filled the faubourgs with joy, an old, banal tune: why did its words pierce my soul and make me cry, like any romantic ballad? I savoured it slowly and did not throw a coin through the window for fear of troubling my spirit and discovering that not only the instrument was playing.
I hang limp on the Creator's pen
© Boris Pasternak
Underneath are dykes' secrets; the air
From the railways is sodden and sticky,
Of the fumes of coal and night fires reeking.
But the moment night kills sunset's glare,
It turns pink itself, tinged with far flares,
And the fence stands stiff, paradox-stricken.
From: Time In The Rock
© Conrad Aiken
These things do not perplex, these things are simple,
but what of the heart that wishes to survive change
and cannot, its love lost in confusions and dismay?
what of the thought dispersed in its own algebras,
hypothesis proved fallacy? what of the will
which finds its aim unworthy? Are these, too, simple?
Kaiser Dead
© Matthew Arnold
What, Kaiser dead? The heavy news
Post-haste to Cobham calls the Muse,
From where in Farringford she brews
The ode sublime,
Or with Pen-bryn's bold bard pursues
A rival rhyme.
The Aged Patriarch
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Of life's past woes, the fading trace
Hath given that aged patriarch's face
Expression, holy, deep, resign'd,
The calm sublimity of mind.
Human Life
© Samuel Rogers
An hour like this is worth a thousand passed
In pomp or ease - 'Tis present to the last!
Years glide away untold - 'Tis still the same!
As fresh, as fair as on the day it came!
Au bord de la mer
© Victor Marie Hugo
Oh oui ! la terre est belle et le ciel est superbe ;
Mais quand ton sein palpite et quand ton oeil reluit,
Quand ton pas gracieux court si léger sur l'herbe
Que le bruit d'une lyre est moins doux que son bruit ;
Thespis: Act II
© William Schwenck Gilbert
Jupiter, Aged Diety
Apollo, Aged Diety
Mars, Aged Diety
Diana, Aged Diety
Mercury
Altiora Peto
© George Essex Evans
To each there came the passion and the fire,
The breadth of vision and the sudden light,
And for a moment on an earthly lyre
Quivered a tremor of the Infinite;
Yet to each poet of that deep-browed throng
Twas but the shadow of Immortal Song.
At Long Bay
© Henry Kendall
FIVE years ago! you cannot choose
But know the face of change,
Though July sleeps and Spring renews
The gloss in gorge and range.
The Flower
© Grace Hazard Conkling
But the sun against the tall Pacific
Does not shine and triumph in my memory of that day
As do the leaf-shaped magenta petals
Of that flower you stole for me
From a roadside bougainvillea.
The Embarrassing Episode Of Little Miss Muffet
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
Little Miss Muffet discovered a tuffet,
(Which never occurred to the rest of us)
An Evening Dream
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
I'm leaning where you loved to lean in eventides of old,
The sun has sunk an hour ago behind the treeless wold,
Madhushala (The Tavern)
© Harivansh Rai Bachchan
Seeking wine, the drinker leaves home for the tavern.
Perplexed, he asks, "Which path will take me there?"
People show him different ways, but this is what I have to say,
"Pick a path and keep walking. You will find the tavern."
The Dying Bard
© Sir Walter Scott
I.
Dinas Emlinn, lament; for the moment is nigh,
When mute in the woodlands thine echoes shall die:
No more by sweet Teivi Cadwallon shall rave,
And mix his wild notes with the wild dashing wave.
