Music poems
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The Four Seasons : Autumn
© James Thomson
Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on; the Doric reed once more,
Well pleased, I tune. Whate'er the wintry frost
The Promise In Disturbance
© George Meredith
How low when angels fall their black descent,
Our primal thunder tells: known is the pain
Lines For Music (I)
© Frances Anne Kemble
Loud wind, strong wind, where art thou blowing?
Into the air, the viewless air,
Wind-Clouds And Star-Drifts
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Here am I, bound upon this pillared rock,
Prey to the vulture of a vast desire
That feeds upon my life. I burst my bands
And steal a moment's freedom from the beak,
The clinging talons and the shadowing plumes;
Then comes the false enchantress, with her song;
To an Old Grammar
© Martha M Simpson
Oh, mighty conjuror, you raise
The ghost of my lost youth -
The happy, golden-tinted days
When earth her treasure-trove displays,
And everything is truth.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 251-500 (Whinfield Translation)
© Omar Khayyám
Are you depressed? Then take of bhang one grain,
Of rosy grape-juice take one pint or twain;
Sufis, you say, must not take this or that,
Then go and eat the pebbles off the plain!
Views Of Life
© Anne Brontë
When sinks my heart in hopeless gloom,
And life can show no joy for me;
And I behold a yawning tomb,
Where bowers and palaces should be;
Requiem: The Soldier
© Humbert Wolfe
Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.
The Hall Of Justice
© George Crabbe
Take, take away thy barbarous hand,
And let me to thy Master speak;
Remit awhile the harsh command,
And hear me, or my heart will break.
I.--Life
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
SUFFERING! and yet majestical in pain;
Mysterious! yet, like spring-showers in the sun,
Veiling the light with their melodious rain,
Life is a warp of gloom and glory spun;
Early in the Morning by Li-Young Lee: American Life in Poetry #77 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 200
© Ted Kooser
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
The War After The War
© John Le Gay Brereton
What shall we say, who, drawing indolent breath,
Mark the quick pant of those who, full of hate,
Drive home the steel or loose the shrieking shell,
Heroes or Huns, who smite the grin of death
And laugh or curse beneath the blows of fate,
Swept madly to the thudding heart of hell?
To The Fossil Flower
© Jones Very
Dark fossil flower! I see thy leaves unrolled,
With all thy lines of beauty freshly marked,
Haunted Chambers
© Conrad Aiken
The lamp-lit page is turned, the dream forgotten;
The music changes tone, you wake, remember
Deep worlds you lived before, deep worlds hereafter
Of leaf on falling leaf, music on music,
Rain and sorrow and wind and dust and laughter.
In Memoriam A. H. H.: Preface
© Alfred Tennyson
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how,
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
In France
© Francis Ledwidge
The silence of maternal hills
Is round me in my evening dreams ;
And round me music-making bills
And mingling waves of pastoral streams.
Hope
© William Cowper
Ask what is human life -- the sage replies,
With disappointment lowering in his eyes,
