Nature poems
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Echo by Robert West: American Life in Poetry #114 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Poetry can be thought of as an act of persuasion: a poem attempts to bring about some kind of change in its reader, perhaps no more than a moment of clarity amidst the disorder of everyday life. And successful poems not only make use of the meanings and sounds of words, as well as the images those words conjure up, but may also take advantage of the arrangement of type on a page. Notice how this little poem by Mississippi poet Robert West makes the very best use of the empty space around it to help convey the nature of its subject.
Echo
The Immortality Of Rome
© Richard Monckton Milnes
``Urbi et Orbi,''--mystic euphony,
What depth of Christian meaning lies in Thee!
How, from this world apart, this world above,
Selected by a special will of Love,
Growth of Manlike Growth of Nature
© Emily Dickinson
Growth of Manlike Growth of Nature
Gravitates within
Atmosphere, and Sun endorse it
Bit it stiralone
To Fortune
© James Thomson
For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove
An unrelenting foe to love,
And when we meet a mutual heart
Come in between, and bid us part;
The Toll-Mans Daughter
© Madison Julius Cawein
Once more the June with her great moon
Poured harvest o'er the golden fields;
The Lady of the Lake: Canto VI. - The Guardroom
© Sir Walter Scott
Our vicar still preaches that Peter and Poule
Laid a swinging long curse on the bonny brown bowl,
That there 's wrath and despair in the jolly black-jack,
And the seven deadly sins in a flagon of sack;
Yet whoop, Barnaby! off with thy liquor,
Drink upsees out, and a fig for the vicar!
Runnamede, A Tragedy. Prologue
© John Logan
Yet lost to fame is virtue's orient reign;
The patriot lived, the hero died in vain,
Dark night descended o'er the human day,
And wiped the glory of the world away:
Whirled round the gulf, the acts of time were tost,
Then in the vast abyss for ever lost.
One Day And Another: A Lyrical Eclogue Part III
© Madison Julius Cawein
I seem to see her still; to see
That dim blue room. Her perfume comes
From lavender folds draped dreamily--
One blossom of brocaded blooms--
Some stuff of orient looms.
Cosmic Consciousness
© Sri Aurobindo
I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind's speed and the blazing star.
Elegy VIII. He Describes His Early Love of Poetry, and Its Consequences
© William Shenstone
Ah me! what envious magic thins my fold?
What mutter'd spell retards their late increase?
Such lessening fleeces must the swain behold,
That e'er with Doric pipe essays to please.
Carolan's Prophecy
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Of bridal melody, soon dash'd with grief,
As if some wailing spirit in the strings
Met and o'ermaster'd him: but yielding then
To the strong prophet-impulse, mournfully,
Like moaning waters o'er the harp he pour'd
The trouble of his haunted soul, and sangâ
Between the Sunken Sun and the New Moon
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
BETWEEN the sunken sun and the new moon,
I stood in fields through which a rivulet ran
The Recluse
© James Montgomery
A fountain issuing into light
Before a marble palace, threw
To heaven its column, pure and bright,
Returning thence in showers of dew;
But soon a humbler course it took,
And glide away a nameless brook.
At The Gate Of The Convent
© Alfred Austin
Beside the Convent Gate I stood,
Lingering to take farewell of those
To whom I owed the simple good
Of three days' peace, three nights' repose.
A Manchester Poem
© George MacDonald
'Tis a poor drizzly morning, dark and sad.
The cloud has fallen, and filled with fold on fold
The chimneyed city; and the smoke is caught,
And spreads diluted in the cloud, and sinks,
A black precipitate, on miry streets.
And faces gray glide through the darkened fog.
The Sakiyeh
© Mathilde Blind
Poor Brutes! Who in unconsciousness sublime,
Replenishing the ever-empty jars,
Endow the waste with palms and harvest gold:
And men, who move in rhythm with moving stars,
Should shrink to give the borrowed lives they hold:
Bound blindfold to the groaning wheel of Time.
A Winter Walk
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
WE never had believed, I wis,
At primrose time when west winds stole
Like thoughts of youth across the soul,
In such an altered time as this,
