Music poems
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Written For A Musician
© Vachel Lindsay
Hungry for music with a desperate hunger
I prowled abroad, I threaded through the town;
Red Roses
© Anne Sexton
He pretends he is her ball.
He tries to fold up and bounce
but he squashes like fruit.
For he loves Blue Lady and the spots
of red roses he gives her
The Addict
© Anne Sexton
Don't they know that I promised to die!
I'm keeping in practice.
I'm merely staying in shape.
The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I'm on a diet from death.
The Kiss
© Anne Sexton
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool!
Symphonic Studies (After Schumann)
© Emma Lazarus
Prelude
Blue storm-clouds in hot heavens of mid-July
Romance Moderne
© William Carlos Williams
Mountains. Elephants humping along
against the skyindifferent to
light withdrawing its tattered shreds,
worn out with embraces. It's
the fillip of novelty. It's a fire in the blood.
Fall of the Evening Star
© Kenneth Patchen
And the earth takes it softly, in natural love…
Exactly as we take each other…
and go to sleep…
Patience
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
SHE hath no beauty in her face,
Unless the chastened sweetness there
And meek long-suffering yield a grace
To make her mournful features fair.
Ballade Of Midsummer Days And Nights
© William Ernest Henley
And it's O, for my dear and the charm that stays -
Midsummer days! Midsummer days!
It's O, for my Love and the dark that plights -
Midsummer nights! O midsummer nights!
Music Is Time by Jill Bialosky : American Life in Poetry #263 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-20
© Ted Kooser
Music lessons, well, maybe 80 out of every 100 of us had them, once, and a few of us went on to play our chosen instruments all our lives. But the rest of us? I still own a set of red John Thompson piano books that haven’t been opened since about 1950. Here Jill Bialosky, who lives in New York City, captures the atmosphere of one of those lessons.
The Princess (part 2)
© Alfred Tennyson
At break of day the College Portress came:
She brought us Academic silks, in hue
The Prisoner: Pt 1
© Emily Jane Brontë
In the dungeon crypts idly did I stray,
Reckless of the lives wasting there away;
"Draw the ponderous bars; open, Warder stern!"
He dare not say me naythe hinges harshly turn.
To Cesario
© Mary Darby Robinson
CESARIO, thy Lyre's dulcet measure,
So sweetly, so tenderly flows;
That could my sad soul taste of pleasure,
Thy music would soften its woes.
The Widow's Home
© Mary Darby Robinson
Close on the margin of a brawling brook
That bathes the low dell's bosom, stands a Cot;
O'ershadow'd by broad Alders. At its door
A rude seat, with an ozier canopy
The Poor Singing Dame
© Mary Darby Robinson
Beneath an old wall, that went round an old Castle,
For many a year, with brown ivy o'erspread;
A neat little Hovel, its lowly roof raising,
Defied the wild winds that howl'd over its shed:
The Lascar
© Mary Darby Robinson
I. "Another day, Ah! me, a day
"Of dreary Sorrow is begun!
"And still I loath the temper'd ray,
"And still I hate the sickly Sun!
Conscious
© Wilfred Owen
His fingers wake, and flutter; up the bed.
His eyes come open with a pull of will,
Harvest-Home
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O'ER all the fragrant land this harvest day,
What bounteous sheaves are garnered, ear and blade!
Whether the heavens be golden-glad, or gray,--
And the swart laborers toil in sun or shade:--
