Time poems
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The Old Meeting House
© Alfred Noyes
(new jersey, 1918)
Its quiet graves were made for peace till Gabriel blows his horn.
Those wise old elms could hear no cry
Of all that distant agony
Only the red-winged blackbird, and the rustle of thick ripe corn.
from Totem Poem [In the yellow time of pollen]
© Luke Davies
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
from Queen Mab: Part VI
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
(excerpt)
"Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,
The Way to the River
© William Stanley Merwin
The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor
My Papa’s Waltz
© Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
There Came a Soul
© Rita Dove
After IVAN ALBRIGHT’s Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida
She arrived as near to virginal
A Lesson in Geography
© Kenneth Rexroth
In the Japanese quarter
A phonograph playing
“Moonlight on ruined castles”
Kojo n'suki
The Loneliness of the Military Historian
© Margaret Atwood
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
Before Parting
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
A month or twain to live on honeycomb
Is pleasant; but one tires of scented time,
Cold sweet recurrence of accepted rhyme,
And that strong purple under juice and foam
Where the wine’s heart has burst;
Nor feel the latter kisses like the first.
The Lady’s Dressing Room
© Jonathan Swift
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
Marrying the Hangman
© Margaret Atwood
She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present
time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape.
"Go, lovely Rose"
© Edmund Waller
Go, lovely Rose
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 44
© Alfred Tennyson
How fares it with the happy dead?
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.
Power
© Elizabeth Daryush
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
Sonnet XXXII: If thou Survive my Well-contented Day
© William Shakespeare
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
