Time poems
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Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont
© André Breton
I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
Retreat
© John Fuller
I should like to live in a sunny town like this
Where every afternoon is half-day closing
And I would wait at the terminal for the one train
Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving.
The Weakness
© Toi Derricotte
That time my grandmother dragged me
through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up
To A Young Gentleman In Love. A Tale
© Matthew Prior
From publick Noise and factious Strife,
From all the busie Ills of Life,
Schemhammphorasch
© Rose Terry Cooke
‘This is the key which was given by the angel Michael to Pali, and by Pali to Moses. If “thou canst read it, then shalt thou understand the words of men, … the whistling of birds, the language of date-trees, the unity of hearts, ... nay, even the thoughts of the rains.”’
Gleanings after the Talmud
The Song of a Prison
© Henry Lawson
Tis a song of the weary warders, whom prisoners call the screws
A class of men who I fancy would cleave to the Evening News.
They look after their treasures sadly. By the screw of their keys they are known,
And they screw them many times daily before they draw their own.
My mother’s body
© Marge Piercy
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 126
© Alfred Tennyson
Love is and was my Lord and King,
And in his presence I attend
To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.
Eclogue 4: Pollio
© Publius Vergilius Maro
Muses of Sicily, essay we now
A somewhat loftier task! Not all men love
Coppice or lowly tamarisk: sing we woods,
Woods worthy of a Consul let them be.
Parkinson’s Disease
© Washington Allston
While spoon-feeding him with one hand
she holds his hand with her other hand,
The Passing of Love
© Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
O God, forgive me that I ranged
My life into a dream of love!
Will tears of anguish never wash
The passion from my blood?
The Wild Swans at Coole
© William Butler Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
My Beloved Is Mine, And I Am His
© Francis Quarles
EV'N like two little bank-dividing brooks,
That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
Where in a greater current they conjoyn:
So I my best-beloved's am; so he is mine.
Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward
© Anne Sexton
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
The Isles Of Sleep.
© Robert Crawford
The opiate isles upon time's sea
In the dream-dark
Rise with their harbours silently
Before each day-abandoned bark,
To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
