Music poems

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Tribute To Oliver Wendell Holmes

© Julia Ward Howe

Thou man of noble mould!
Whose metal grows not cold
Beneath the hammer of the hurrying years;
A fiery breath doth blow
Across its fervid glow,
And still its resonance delights our ears;

Silent Music by Floyd Skloot: American Life in Poetry #94 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006

While many of the poems we feature in this column are written in open forms, that's not to say I don't respect good writing done in traditional meter and rhyme. But a number of contemporary poets, knowing how a rigid attachment to form can take charge of the writing and drag the poet along behind, will choose, say, the traditional villanelle form, then relax its restraints through the use of broken rhythm and inexact rhymes. I'd guess that if I weren't talking about it, you might not notice, reading this poem by Floyd Skloot, that you were reading a sonnet.

Silent Music

To Me At My Fifth-Floor Window

© William Ernest Henley

To me at my fifth-floor window
The chimney-pots in rows
Are sets of pipes pandean
For every wind that blows;

Andromeda

© Charles Kingsley

Over the sea, past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward,

Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired AEthiop people,

The Way Of The World

© George Frederick Cameron

WE sneer and we laugh with the lipthe most of us do it,
Whenever a brother goes down like a weed with the tide;
We point with the finger and sayOh, we knew it! we knew it!
But, see! we are better than he was, and we will abide.

The Prisoner

© Emily Jane Brontë

STILL let my tyrants know, I am not doom'd to wear
Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.

Compensations

© Wilcox Ella Wheeler

I: BLIND

When first the shadows fell, like prison bars,

Ascension Day

© John Keble

Soft cloud, that while the breeze of May
Chants her glad matins in the leafy arch,
Draw'st thy bright veil across the heavenly way
Meet pavement for an angel's glorious march:

Gotham - Book III

© Charles Churchill

Can the fond mother from herself depart?

Can she forget the darling of her heart,

Aspasia

© Giacomo Leopardi

At times thy image to my mind returns,

Aspasia. In the crowded streets it gleams

The Caique

© William Makepeace Thackeray

Yonder to the kiosk, beside the creek,
Paddle the swift caique.
Thou brawny oarsman with the sunburnt cheek,
Quick! for it soothes my heart to hear the Bulbul speak.

Victory

© Alfred Noyes

I.
Before those golden altar-lights we stood,
Each one of us remembering his own dead.
A more than earthly beauty seemed to brood
On that hushed throng, and bless each bending head.

A Song Of Winds

WOE to the weak when the sky is shrouded,
And the wind of the salt-way sobs as it dies!
Woe to the weak! for a great dejection
Droops their spirits and drowns their eyes.

A Dream Of Sunshine

© Eugene Field

I'm weary of this weather and I hanker for the ways

Which people read of in the psalms and preachers paraphrase--

Amours De Voyage, Canto I

I am to tell you, you say, what I think of our last new acquaintance.
Well, then, I think that George has a very fair right to be jealous.
I do not like him much, though I do not dislike being with him.
He is what people call, I suppose, a superior man, and
Certainly seems so to me; but I think he is terribly selfish.

Improvisations: Light And Snow: 05

© Conrad Aiken

When I was a boy, and saw bright rows of icicles

In many lengths along a wall

The Orator.

He has a charm that sets each thought to music,
So rare an utterance, whoso hears him feels
Even a prosy theme has poesy
When a magician takes its study on.