Sad poems
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The Brus Book XVII
© John Barbour
[Only Berwick remains in English hands; a burgess offers to betray it]
The lordis off the land war fayne
Die beiden Nachtigallen -- With English translation
© Ludwig Bechstein
Zwei Nachtigallen sangen
In einem Gartenraum,
Auf hoher Tanne die eine,
Die and're auf blühendem Baum.
The Eve of St. John
© Sir Walter Scott
The baron of Smaylho'me rose with day,
He spurr'd his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way,
That leads to Brotherstone.
The Palm Branch Of Palestine
© Mikhail Lermontov
Palm branch of Palestine, oh tell me,
In that far distant home-land fair,
Wast rooted in the mountain gravel
Or sprung from some vale garden rare?
The Witch of Wenham
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I.
Along Crane River's sunny slopes
Blew warm the winds of May,
And over Naumkeag's ancient oaks
The green outgrew the gray.
Sonnet XV. From Petrarch
© Charlotte Turner Smith
WHERE the green leaves exclude the summer beam,
And softly bend as balmy breezes blow,
And where, with liquid lapse, the lucid stream
Across the fretted rock is heard to flow,
The Battle Of The Lake Regillus
© Thomas Babbington Macaulay
A Lay Sung at the Feast of Castor and Pollux on the Ides of Quintilis in the year of the City CCCCLI.
I.
An Autumn Picture
© Alfred Austin
Now round red roofs stand russet stacks arow:
Homeward from gleaning in the stubbly wheat,
The Faithful Friend
© Caroline Norton
O, FRIEND! whose heart the grave doth shroud from human joy or woe,
Know'st thou who wanders by thy tomb, with footsteps sad and slow?
Know'st thou whose brow is dark with grief? whose eyes are dim with tears?
Whose restless soul is sinking with its agony of fears?
Whose hope hath fail'd, whose star hath sunk, whose firmest trust deceived,
Since, leaning on thy faithful breast, he loved and believed?
"As a White Stone..."
© Anna Akhmatova
As a white stone in the well's cool deepness,
There lays in me one wonderful remembrance.
I am not able and don't want to miss this:
It is my torture and my utter gladness.
The Angel In The House. Book I. Canto II.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
IV A Distinction
The lack of lovely pride, in her
Who strives to please, my pleasure numbs,
And still the maid I most prefer
Whose care to please with pleasing comes.
My Father
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
MY father! in the vague, mysterious past,
My boyish thoughts have wandered o'er and o'er,
To thy lone grave upon a distant shore,
The wanderer of the waters, still at last.
Italy : 26. The Campagna Of Florence
© Samuel Rogers
'Tis morning. Let us wander through the fields,
Where Cimabue found a shepherd-boy
Tracing his idle fancies on the ground;
And let us from the top of Fiesole,
The Flowers
© Rudyard Kipling
To our private taste, there is always something a little exotic,
almost artificial, in songs which, under an English aspect and dress,
are yet so manifestly the product of other skies. They affect us
like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote;
Requiescat
© William Makepeace Thackeray
Under the stone you behold,
Buried, and coffined, and cold,
Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold.
The Pilot
© William Henry Ogilvie
Time was when the sportsman, with chivalrous care,
Would find a safe line for his follower fair,
To Ellinda, That Lately I Have Not Written
© Richard Lovelace
I.
If in me anger, or disdaine
In you, or both, made me refraine
From th' noble intercourse of verse,
To Emilia Viviani
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
II.
Send the stars light, but send not love to me,
In whom love ever made
Health like a heap of embers soon to fade--
