Music poems
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Symphony of a Mexican Garden
© Grace Hazard Conkling
But all across the trudging ragged chords
That are the tangled grasses in the heat,
The mariposa lilies fluttering
Like trills upon some archangelic flute,
Song of the Open Road
© Walt Whitman
1
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Tenebrae
© Geoffrey Hill
Veni Redemptor, but not in our time.
Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world.
‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned.
Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place.
Teaching English from an Old Composition Book
© Gary Soto
My chalk is no longer than a chip of fingernail,
Chip by which I must explain this Monday
Portrait of a Lady
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
"I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.
Summer in a Small Town
© Tony Hoagland
Yes, the young mothers are beautiful,
with all the self-acceptance of exhaustion,
still dazed from their great outpouring,
pushing their strollers along the public river walk.
from The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time
© André Breton
Not uselessly employ'd,
I might pursue this theme through every change
Of exercise and play, to which the year
Did summon us in its delightful round.
To a Skylark
© André Breton
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!
The Barrel-Organ
© Alfred Noyes
Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time.
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!),
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland.
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!).
The Missionary - Canto Second
© William Lisle Bowles
The night was still and clear, when, o'er the snows,
Andes! thy melancholy Spirit rose,--
A shadow stern and sad: he stood alone,
Upon the topmost mountain's burning cone;
And whilst his eyes shone dim, through surging smoke,
Thus to the spirits of the fire he spoke:--
The Dirge Of The Winds
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
The four winds of earth, the North, South, East, and West,
Shrieked and groaned, sobbed and wailed, like the soul of unrest.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
© Simon Armitage
Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in English
about dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks.
Sacred And Profane Love
© Alfred Austin
Profane Love speaks
``I am the Goddess mortals call Profane,
Yet worship me as though I were divine;
Over their lives, unrecognised, I reign,
For all their thoughts are mine.
Reflections Of A Magistrand
© Robert Fuller Murray
on returning to St. Andrews
In the hard familiar horse-box I am sitting once again;
Creeping back to old St. Andrews comes the slow North British train,
Bearing bejants with their luggage (boxes full of heavy books,
The Sorcerer: Act I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
For to-day young Alexis-young Alexis Pointdextre
Is betrothed to Aline-to Aline Sangazure,
And that pride of his sex is-of his sex is to be next her
At the feast on the green-on the green, oh, be sure!
The Test of Fantasy
© Joanne Kyger
It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward. All the stories
come folding out. The smells and flowers begin to come back, as
the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded. Rabbits and violets.
from The Shepheardes Calender: October
© Edmund Spenser
The dapper ditties, that I wont devise,
To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry,
Delighten much: what I the bett for thy?
They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise.
I beate the bush, the byrds to them doe flye:
What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
