Pet poems
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Brune
© François Coppée
Sur le terrain de foire, au grand soleil brûlé,
Le cirque des chevaux de bois s'est ébranlé
Et l'orgue attaque l'air connu: "Tant mieux pour elle!"
Mais la brune grisette a fermé son ombrelle,
In Early May
© Bliss William Carman
O MY dear, the world to-day
Is more lovely than a dream!
Magic hints from far away
Haunt the woodland, and the stream
The Old Fools
© Philip Larkin
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Italy : 1. The Lake Of Geneva
© Samuel Rogers
Day glimmered in the east, and the white Moon
Hung like a vapour in the cloudless sky,
Epigramma in Duos montes Amosclivum Et Bilboreum
© Andrew Marvell
Farfacio.Cernis ut ingenti distinguant limite campum
Montis Amos clivi Bilboreique juga!
Ille stat indomitus turritis undisque saxis:
Cingit huic laetum Fraximus alta Caput.
Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome
© Andrew Marvell
Oblig'd by frequent visits of this man,
Whom as Priest, Poet, and Musician,
I for some branch of Melchizedeck took,
(Though he derives himself from my Lord Brooke)
Sordello: Book the Fourth
© Robert Browning
Meantime Ferrara lay in rueful case;
The lady-city, for whose sole embrace
Last Instructions to a Painter
© Andrew Marvell
Here, Painter, rest a little, and survey
With what small arts the public game they play.
For so too Rubens, with affairs of state,
His labouring pencil oft would recreate.
Hortus
© Andrew Marvell
Quisnam adeo, mortale genus, praecordia versat:
Heu Palmae, Laurique furor, vel simplicis Herbae!
Arbor ut indomitos ornet vix una labores;
Tempora nec foliis praecingat tota maglignis.
To His Noble Friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace, Upon His Poems
© Andrew Marvell
Sir,
Our times are much degenerate from those
Which your sweet muse with your fair fortune chose,
And as complexions alter with the climes,
A Letter To Doctor Ingelo, then With My Lord Whitlock, Amba
© Andrew Marvell
Quid facis Arctoi charissime transfuga coeli,
Ingele, proh sero cognite, rapte cito?
Num satis Hybernum defendis pellibus Astrum,
Qui modo tam mollis nec bene firmus eras?
The Star-Apple Kingdom
© Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
The Lady and the Tramp by Bruce Guernsey: American Life in Poetry #139 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureat
© Ted Kooser
Man's best friend is, of course, woman's best friend, too. The Illinois poet, Bruce Guernsey, offers us this snapshot of a mutually agreed upon dependency that leads to a domestic communion.
Houses
© Joyce Kilmer
(For Aline)When you shall die and to the sky
Serenely, delicately go,
Saint Peter, when he sees you there,
Will clash his keys and say:
The Petition for an Absolute Retreat
© Anne Kingsmill Finch
Give me, O indulgent Fate!
Give me yet before I die
A sweet, but absolute retreat,
'Mongst paths so lost and trees so high
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 1 - 250 (Whinfield Translation)
© Omar Khayyám
At dawn a cry through all the tavern shrilled,
"Arise, my brethren of the revelers' guild,
That I may fill our measure full of wine,
Or e'er the measure of our days be filled."
Of Any Old Man
© Isaac Rosenberg
Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness,
With alien uproar and rude jolly cries,
The Hymn
© Anne Kingsmill Finch
To the Almighty on his radiant Throne,
Let endless Hallelujas rise!
Praise Him, ye wondrous Heights to us unknown,
Praise Him, ye Heavens unreach'd by mortal Eyes,
Praise Him, in your degree, ye sublunary Skies!
Man's Injustice Towards Providence
© Anne Kingsmill Finch
Vain-glorious Man do's thus the Praise engross,
When Prosp'rous Days around him spread their Beams:
But, if revolv'd to opposite Extreams,
Still his own Sence he fondly will prefer,
And Providence, not He, in his Affairs must Err!
