Power poems
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Sonnet 100: Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long
© William Shakespeare
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
Not marble nor the guilded monuments (Sonnet 55)
© William Shakespeare
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When You Wake In Your Crib
© William Ernest Henley
When you wake in your crib,
You, an inch of experience -
Affliction (I)
© George Herbert
When first thou didst entice to thee my heart,
I thought the service brave;
So many joyes I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of naturall delights,
Augmented with thy gracious benefits.
A Lover's Complaint
© William Shakespeare
FROM off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sistering vale,
My spirits to attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale;
A Lay Of Old Time
© John Greenleaf Whittier
One morning of the first sad Fall,
Poor Adam and his bride
Sat in the shade of Eden's wall--
But on the outer side.
On The Death Of Mr. Robert Levet, A Practiser In Physic
© Samuel Johnson
CONDEMN'D to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.
Beauty.
© Robert Crawford
He came upon her with a soul athirst
For Beauty, and she unveiled all to him,
As if in an imaginary light
Revealing all her wondrous rarity,
Remembrance
© Amelia Opie
How dear to me the twilight hour!
It breathes, it speaks of pleasures past;
When Laura sought this humble bower,
And o'er it courtly splendours cast.
Sordello: Book the Third
© Robert Browning
Whereat he rose.
The level wind carried above the firs
Clouds, the irrevocable travellers,
Onward.
confessions of a fool
© Rg Gregory
(i)
i believed in flower-power (the triumph of the meek)
the thought that what a wind could bend was not to be
derided for its weakness but known to draw its calm
from a corporate sense of self (its many-ed history)
that tyranny (in the long blow) lacked the will to break
October
© Madison Julius Cawein
I oft have met her slowly wandering
Beside a leafy stream, her locks blown wild,
snowdrop blaze
© Rg Gregory
from late december onwards the day comes back
but not till february do we see those glimpses
that let us take deep darkness off the rack
and shake it free of lethargy that cramps us
eight roundels
© Rg Gregory
(roundel: variation of the rondeau
consisting of three stanzas of three
lines each, linked together with but
two rhymes and a refrain at the end
of the first and third group)
An Elegy on Parting
© James Thomson
It was a sad, ay 'twas a sad farewell,
I still afresh the pangs of parting feel;
Against my breast my heart impatient beat,
And in deep sighs bemoan'd its cruel fate;
Paradise Lost : Book II.
© John Milton
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth or Ormus and of Ind,
temporising with the eternal
© Rg Gregory
i dont know what youre up to
yet but for me
you wouldnt exist
(not on this page anyway -
The Relic
© John Greenleaf Whittier
TOKEN Of friendship true and tried,
From one whose fiery heart of youth
With mine has beaten, side by side,
For Liberty and Truth;
owl power
© Rg Gregory
the bird was cherished by minerva
hebrews loathed it as unclean
buddhists treasure its seclusion
elsewhere night-hag evil omen
Sonnet : On Launching Some Bottles Filled With Knowledge Into The Bristol Channel
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Vessels of heavenly medicine! may the breeze
Auspicious waft your dark green forms to shore;
Safe may ye stem the wide surrounding roar
Of the wild whirlwinds and the raging seas;
