Time poems
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Sonnet I: From fairest creatures we desire increase
© William Shakespeare
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
The Ballad of Nat Turner
© Robert Hayden
Then fled, O brethren, the wicked juba
and wandered wandered far
from curfew joys in the Dismal’s night.
Fool of St. Elmo’s fire
Styx
© Robert Duncan
the cold water, the black rushing gleam, the
moving down-rush, wash, gush out over
bed-rock, toiling the boulders in flood,
purling in deeps, broad flashing in falls—
To Aristius Fuscus
© Eugene Field
Fuscus, whoso to good inclines,
And is a faultless liver,
Nor Moorish spear nor bow need fear,
Nor poison-arrowed quiver.
The Father of My Country
© Diane Wakoski
All fathers in Western civilization must have
a military origin. The
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: XLIX
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
I will not tell the secrets of that place.
When Madame Blanche returned to us again
I was kneeling there, while Esther kissed my face
And dried and comforted my tears. O vain
The Song of Songs
© King Solomon
The Song of songs, which is Solomon's.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:
for thy love is better than wine.
Because of the savor of thy good ointments
thy name is as ointment poured forth,
therefore do the virgins love thee.
September, 1819
© André Breton
Departing summer hath assumed
An aspect tenderly illumed,
The gentlest look of spring;
That calls from yonder leafy shade
Unfaded, yet prepared to fade,
A timely carolling.
On A Diet
© William Matthews
to the heaven of revisions. Why be
adipose: an expense, etc.,
in a waste, etc.? Something like
the body of the poet’s work, with its
pale shadows, begins to pare and replace
the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?
Bologna: A Poem About Gold
© James Wright
She looks like only the heavy deep gold
That drags thrones down
All day long on the vine.
Mary in Bologna, sunlight I gathered all morning
And pressed in my hands all afternoon
And drank all day with my golden-breasted
The Bathers
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Hither, from thirsty day
And stifling labour and the street's hot glare,
To twilight shut away
Beyond the soft roar, under hovering trees,
Miranda’s Drowned Book
© Debora Greger
Perhaps not world enough, but I had time
to watch a hermit crab align himself
and back into a vacant whelk and haul
the home he wore from rocky A to B.
All that watching—watching for what? A sail
blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs?
Ave Atque Vale
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
In Memory of Charles Baudelaire
Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
Scorn Not The Sonnet
© William Wordsworth
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
The Glories Of The Present
© Edgar Albert Guest
WHAT of the glories after death,
When this frail form gives up its breath?
