Patience poems
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Swift
© Delmore Schwartz
What shall Presto do for pretty prattle
To entertain his dears? Sunday: lightning fifty times!
This week to Flanders goes the Duke of Ormond!
Shall hope of him, although he loves me well!
The View from an Attic Window
© Howard Nemerov
for Francis and Barbara
1
Among the high-branching, leafless boughs
Above the roof-peaks of the town,
Snowflakes unnumberably come down.
Fand, A Feerie Act III
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
[She looks towards the sea.
Attendant. None.
The sea mist drives too thickly.
A Soul in Prison
© Augusta Davies Webster
"They," you'd answer me,
if you owned my instance, "sorrowed in their doubt,
and did not wholly doubt, and loved."
Year’s End
© Lola Ridge
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
The Aeneid of Virgil: Book 10
© Publius Vergilius Maro
THE GATES of heavn unfold: Jove summons all
The gods to council in the common hall.
Evangeline: Part The First. V.
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
FOUR times the sun had risen and set; and now on the fifth day
Cheerily called the cock to the sleeping maids of the farm-house.
Paradise Regain'd: Book I (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
I Who e're while the happy Garden sung,
By one mans disobedience lost, now sing
The Waste Land
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
La Patrie
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Through storm--blown gloom the subtle light persists;
Shapes of tumultuous, ghostly cloud appear,
Trailing a dark shower from hill--drenching mists:
Dawn, desolate in its majesty, is here.
Have You Prayed?
© Li-Young Lee
When the wind
turns and asks, in my father’s voice,
Have you prayed?
My Bride That Is To Be
© James Whitcomb Riley
O soul of mine, look out and see
My bride, my bride that is to be!
The Unknown Eros. Book I.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to hold
In vestal February;
Not rather choosing out some rosy day
From the rich coronet of the coming May,
When all things meet to marry!
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
Art
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
Lines Written In London
© Frances Anne Kemble
Struggle not with thy life!the heavy doom
Resist not, it will bow thee like a slave:
Lost In The Mist
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
THE thin white snow-streaks pencilling
That mountain's shoulder gray,
While in the west the pale green sky
Smiled back the dawning day,
The Fair Youth Sonnets (18 - 77, 87 - 126)
© William Shakespeare
Comprising the largest grouping of poems, the Fair Youth sonnets are addressed to the same young man in the Procreation Sonnets. But their themes and subjects are more drastically varied.
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Odysseus' Fate
© Konstantin Nikolaevich Batiushkov
Through horrors of land and horrors of sea
Bereft and wandering, Odysseus,
