Time poems
/ page 448 of 792 /
Haymaking
© Edward Thomas
Aftear night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
Song: I prithee spare me gentle boy
© Sir John Suckling
I prithee spare me gentle boy,
Press me no more for that slight toy,
That foolish trifle of an heart;
I swear it will not do its part,
Though thou dost thine, employst thy powr and art.
Sonnet 52: "So am I as the rich whose blessed key..."
© William Shakespeare
So am I as the rich whose blessed key,
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
Wait
© C. K. Williams
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.
To Joanna
© William Wordsworth
AMID the smoke of cities did you pass
The time of early youth; and there you learned,
Deola Thinking
© Cesare Pavese
Deola passes her mornings sitting in a cafe,
and nobody looks at her. Everyone’s rushing to work,
Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount
© Benjamin Jonson
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower, yet, O faintly, gentle springs!
A Apostacy Of One, And But One Lady
© Richard Lovelace
I.
That frantick errour I adore,
And am confirm'd the earth turns round;
Now satisfied o're and o're,
The Picture Book
© Robert Graves
When I was not quite five years old
I first saw the blue picture book,
And Fraulein Spitzenburger told
Stories that sent me hot and cold;
I loathed it, yet I had to look:
It was a German book.
Under the Dome
© Elise Paschen
At times they will fly under. The dome
contains jungles. Invent a sky under the dome.
Sonnet XLVIII. Gladstone.
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
FOR Peace, and all that follows in her path
Nor slighting honor and his country's fame,
He stood unmoved, and dared to face the blame
Of party-spirit and its turbid wrath.
More Sonnets At Christmas
© Allen Tate
Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke
By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear
Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke—
Remove it and there’s not a ghost to fear
This crucial day, whose decapitate joke
Languidly winds into the inner ear.
Long time a child, and still a child, when years
© Victor Segalen
Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I,
Study in Orange and White
© Billy Collins
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the painting
of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay
among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes
of the French Impressionists.
The Clote (Water-Lily)
© William Barnes
O zummer clote! when the brook’s a-glidèn
So slow an’ smooth down his zedgy bed,
On the Metro
© C. K. Williams
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
Effort at Speech Between Two People
© Katha Pollitt
: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :
a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.
