Music poems
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‘Be Music, Night’
© Kenneth Patchen
Be music, night,
That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs
To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
Our Casuarina Tree
© Toru Dutt
LIKE a huge Python, winding round and round
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,
The Baptistry
© Ada Cambridge
One winter eve, at twilight, when the sound
Of sorrowful winds scarce troubled Nature's rest,
As she lay sleeping, with her hair unbound,
Holding her grey robe to her shivering breast,
Sonnet. "Spirit of all sweet sounds! who in mid air"
© Frances Anne Kemble
Spirit of all sweet sounds! who in mid air
Sittest enthroned, vouchsafe to hear my prayer!
The Film
© Kate Northrop
Come, let’s go in.
The ticket-taker
has shyly grinned
and it’s almost time,
Lovely One.
Let’s go in.
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
Italy : 10. Como
© Samuel Rogers
I love to sail along the Larian Lake
Under the shore -- though not to visit Pliny,
To catch him musing in his plane-tree walk,
Or fishing, as he might be, from his window:
Genie
© Arthur Rimbaud
He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.
He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life
And we remember him and he travels. . . And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”
He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.
Peach Blooms
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O! tenderly beautiful, beyond compare,
Flushed from pale pink to deepest rosebud hue--
Nurslings of tranquil sunshine and mild air,
Of shadowless dawn, and silvery twilight dew--
Ye blush and burn, as if your flickering grace
Were love's own tint on Spring's enamored face!
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
Locksley Hall
© Alfred Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
The Instruction Manual
© John Ashbery
As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
Mabel Martin
© John Greenleaf Whittier
PROEM.
I CALL the old time back: I bring my lay
in tender memory of the summer day
When, where our native river lapsed away,
The Little Old-Fashioned Church
© Edgar Albert Guest
THE little old-fashioned church, with the pews that were straight-backed and plain,
Where the sunbeams to worship came in through the windows that bore not a stain,
And the choir was composed of the good folks who toiled week-days in meadow and lane;
