Nature poems
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I Love The Naked Ages Long Ago
© Charles Baudelaire
I love the naked ages long ago
When statues were gilded by Apollo,
When men and women of agility
Could play without lies and anxiety,
Correspondences
© Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a temple where the living pillars
Let go sometimes a blurred speech
A Forest of symbols passes through a man's reach
And observes him with a familiar regard.
Une Charogne
© Charles Baudelaire
Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux :
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infame
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,
Wordsworth
© Henry Van Dyke
But thou in youth hast known the breaking stress
Of passion, and hast trod despair's dry ground
Beneath black thoughts that wither and destroy.
Ah, wanderer, led by human tenderness
Home to the heart of Nature, thou hast found
The hidden Fountain of Recovered Joy.
Sicily, December 1908
© Henry Van Dyke
Is Nature, then, a strife of jealous powers,
And man the plaything of unconscious fate?
Not so, my troubled heart! God reigns above
And man is greatest in his darkest hours:
Walking amid the cities desolate,
The Son of God appears in human love.
Patria
© Henry Van Dyke
For like a law of nature in my blood
I feel thy sweet and secret sovereignty,
And woven through my soul thy vital sign.
My life is but a wave, and thou the flood;
I am a leaf and thou the mother-tree;
Nor should I be at all, were I not thine.
Love's Reason
© Henry Van Dyke
But for a something in thy form and face,
Thy looks and ways, of primal harmony;
A certain soothing charm, a vital grace
That breathes of the eternal womanly,
And makes me feel the warmth of Nature's breast,
When in her arms, and thine, I sink to rest.
A Rondeau of College Rhymes
© Henry Van Dyke
Our college rhymes,--how light they seem,
Like little ghosts of love's young dream
That led our boyish hearts away
From lectures and from books, to stray
By flowery mead and flowing stream!
Humanitad
© Oscar Wilde
It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
Her jealous brother pilfers, but is true
To the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew
Ravenna
© Oscar Wilde
(Newdigate prize poem recited in the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford
June
26th, 1878.
Magpiety
© Czeslaw Milosz
The same and not quite the same, I walked through oak forests
Amazed that my Muse, Mnemosyne,
Has in no way diminished my amazement.
A magpie was screeching and I said: Magpiety?
Echoes
© Lewis Carroll
Lady Clara Vere de Vere
Was eight years old, she said:
Every ringlet, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden thread.
After the Pleasure Party: Lines Traced Under an Image of Amor Threatening
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Fear me, virgin whosoever
Taking pride from love exempt,
Fear me, slighted. Never, never
Brave me, nor my fury tempt:
Downy wings, but wroth they beat
Tempest even in reason's seat.
Yarrow Visited. September, 1814
© André Breton
And is this—Yarrow?—This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished,
from Totem Poem [If every step taken is a step well-lived]
© Luke Davies
And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot
towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path
An Anatomy of the World
© John Donne
(excerpt)
AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
Wherein,
by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress
To Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland
© Benjamin Jonson
That poets are far rarer births than kings
Your noblest father proved; like whom before,
from The Seasons: Spring
© James Thomson
As rising from the vegetable World
My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend,
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 118
© Alfred Tennyson
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
