Smile poems
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A Letter Home
© Siegfried Sassoon
(To Robert Graves) I Here I'm sitting in the gloom
Of my quiet attic room.
France goes rolling all around,
Fledged with forest May has crowned.
The General
© Siegfried Sassoon
Good-morning; good-morning! the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of em dead,
And were cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
Hes a cheery old card, grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
There was a Child Once
© Katherine Mansfield
There was a child once.
He came--quite alone--to play in my garden;
He was pale and silent.
When we met we kissed each other,
But when he went away, we did not even wave
The Man with the Wooden Leg
© Katherine Mansfield
There was a man lived quite near us;
He had a wooden leg and a goldfinch in a green cage.
His name was Farkey Anderson,
And he'd been in a war to get his leg.
The Awakening River
© Katherine Mansfield
The gulls are mad-in-love with the river,
And the river unveils her face and smiles.
In her sleep-brooding eyes they mirror their shining wings.
She lies on silver pillows: the sun leans over her.
Song From Heine
© Thomas Hardy
I scanned her picture dreaming,
Till each dear line and hue
Was imaged, to my seeming,
As if it lived anew.
Rome: The Vatican-Sala Delle Muse.
© Thomas Hardy
I sat in the Muses' Hall at the mid of the day,
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.
The Widow
© Thomas Hardy
By Mellstock Lodge and Avenue
Towards her door I went,
And sunset on her window-panes
Reflected our intent.
At An Inn
© Thomas Hardy
WHEN we as strangers sought
Their catering care,
Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
Of what we were.
The Bridge of Lodi.
© Thomas Hardy
When of tender mind and body
I was moved by minstrelsy,
And that strain "The Bridge of Lodi"
Brought a strange delight to me.
Lines
© Thomas Hardy
BEFORE we part to alien thoughts and aims,
Permit the one brief word the occasion claims;
--When mumming and grave projects are allied,
Perhaps an Epilogue is justified.
A Sign-Seeker
© Thomas Hardy
I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry,
The day-tides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
To Lizbie Browne
© Thomas Hardy
Dear Lizbie Browne,
Where are you now?
In sun, in rain? -
Or is your brow
Past joy, past pain,
Dear Lizbie Browne?
De Profundis
© Thomas Hardy
Wintertime nighs;
But my bereavement-pain
It cannot bring again:
Twice no one dies.
Long Plighted
© Thomas Hardy
Is it worth while, dear, now,
To call for bells, and sally forth arrayed
For marriage-rites -- discussed, decried, delayed
So many years?
At the War Office, London
© Thomas Hardy
Last year I called this world of gain-givings
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,
So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs
The tragedy of things.
A Man (In Memory of H. of M.)
© Thomas Hardy
In Casterbridge there stood a noble pile,
Wrought with pilaster, bay, and balustrade
In tactful times when shrewd Eliza swayed. -
On burgher, squire, and clown
It smiled the long street down for near a mile
Night In The Old Home
© Thomas Hardy
When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast,
And Life's bare pathway looms like a desert track to me,
And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest,
My perished people who housed them here come back to me.
Embarcation
© Thomas Hardy
Here, where Vespasian's legions struck the sands,
And Cendric with the Saxons entered in,
And Henry's army lept afloat to win
Convincing triumphs over neighboring lands,
In a Wood
© Thomas Hardy
Pale beech and pine-tree blue,
Set in one clay,
Bough to bough cannot you
Bide out your day?
