Power poems
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First Communions
© Arthur Rimbaud
Truly, theyre stupid, these village churches
Where fifteen ugly chicks soiling the pillars
Listen, trilling out their divine responses,
To a black freak whose boots stink of cellars:
But the sun wakes now, through the branches,
The irregular stained-glasss ancient colours.
Elegy V
© Henry James Pye
Thee, sad Melpomene, I once again
Invoke, nor ask the idly plaintive verse:
Dow's Flat
© Francis Bret Harte
Dow's Flat. That's its name;
And I reckon that you
Are a stranger? The same?
Well, I thought it was true,--
For thar isn't a man on the river as can't spot the place at first
view.
The Botanic Garden (Part VI)
© Erasmus Darwin
"Born in yon blaze of orient sky,
"Sweet MAY! thy radiant form unfold;
"Unclose thy blue voluptuous eye,
"And wave thy shadowy locks of gold.
The Ghetto
© Lola Ridge
Cool, inaccessible air
Is floating in velvety blackness shot with steel-blue lights,
But no breath stirs the heat
Leaning its ponderous bulk upon the Ghetto
And most on Hester street…
L'Homme Moyen Sensuel
© Ezra Pound
Yet Radway went. A circumspectious prig!
And then that woman like a guinea-pig
Accosted, that's the word, accosted him,
Thereon the amorous calor slightly frosted him.
(I burn, I freeze, I sweat, said the fair Greek,
I speak in contradictions, so to speak.)
Cyder: Book I
© John Arthur Phillips
What Soil the Apple loves, what Care is due
To Orchats, timeliest when to press the Fruits,
Thy Gift, Pomona, in Miltonian Verse
Adventrous I presume to sing; of Verse
Nor skill'd, nor studious: But my Native Soil
Invites me, and the Theme as yet unsung.
A Cry from South Africa
© James Montgomery
Africa, from her remotest strand,
Lifts to high heaven one fetter'd hand,
An Inventor
© Augusta Davies Webster
I thought this time 'twas done at last,
the workings perfected, the life in it;
and there's the flaw again, the petty flaw,
the fretting small impossibility
that has to be made possible.
Adam: A Sacred Drama. Act 2.
© William Cowper
How exquisitely sweet
This rich display of flowers,
This airy wild of fragrance,
So lovely to the eye,
And to the sense so sweet.
Table Talk
© William Cowper
A. You told me, I remember, glory, built
On selfish principles, is shame and guilt;
Stray Birds 91 - 99
© Rabindranath Tagore
91
THE great earth makes herself hospitable
with the help of the grass.
92
A Story Of Doom: Book III.
© Jean Ingelow
Above the head of great Methuselah
There lay two demons in the opened roof
Invisible, and gathered up his words;
For when the Elder prophesied, it came
About, that hidden things were shown to them,
And burdens that he spake against his time.
Ode To Joy -- With Translation
© Johann Christoph Friedrich Von Schiller
Was den grossen Ring bewohnet,
Huldige der Sympathie!
Zu den Sternen leitet sie,
Wo der Unbekannte thronet.
Maha-Bharata, The Epic Of Ancient India - Book VII - Udyoga -- (The Preparation)
© Romesh Chunder Dutt
And to far Hastina's palace Krishna went to sue for peace,
Raised his voice against the slaughter, begged that strife and feud
should cease!
At Washington
© John Greenleaf Whittier
WITH a cold and wintry noon-light.
On its roofs and steeples shed,
Shadows weaving with t e sunlight
From the gray sky overhead,
Design And Performance
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
They float before my soul, the fair designs
Which I would body forth to life and power,
Marmion: Introduction to Canto III.
© Sir Walter Scott
Like April morning clouds, that pass,
With varying shadow, o'er the grass,
