Time poems
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Recollections of the Arabian Nights
© Alfred Tennyson
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
Spinning by Kevin Griffith : American Life in Poetry #217 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
American literature is rich with poems about the passage of time, and the inevitability of change, and how these affect us. Here is a poem by Kevin Griffith, who lives in Ohio, in which the years accelerate by their passing.
Spinning
The Chairs That No One Sits In
© Billy Collins
You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
Paradise Lost: Book XI (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
He added not, for Adam at the newes
Heart-strook with chilling gripe of sorrow stood,
That all his senses bound; Eve, who unseen
Yet all had heard, with audible lament
Discover'd soon the place of her retire.
Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland,
© William Wordsworth
TOO frail to keep the lofty vow
That must have followed when his brow
Was wreathed--"The Vision" tells us how--
With holly spray,
He faltered, drifted to and fro,
And passed away.
Paradise Lost: Book IX
© Patrick Kavanagh
So gloz'd the Tempter, and his proem tun'd.
Into the heart of Eve his words made way,
Though at the voice much marvelling; at length,
Not unamaz'd, she thus in answer spake:
Sargents Portrait of Edwin Booth at The Players
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
That face which no man ever saw
And from his memory banished quite,
Dream-Land
© Edgar Allan Poe
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.
Aside
© Ishmael Reed
Mail-day, and over the world in a thousand drag-nets
The bundles of letters are dumped on the docks and beaches,
And all that is dear to the personal conscious reaches
Around us again like filings around iron magnets,
And war stands aside for an hour and looks at our faces
Of total absorption that seem to have lost their places.
El Dorado
© John Ashbery
We have a friend in common, the retired sophomore.
His concern: that I shall get it like that,
Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration
© Ernest Christopher Dowson
Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.
Travel Papers
© Carolyn Forche
Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur.
—René Char
By boat to Seurasaari where
the small fish were called vendace.
A man blew a horn of birchwood
toward the nightless sea.
Philosophy
© Nissim Ezekiel
There is a place to which I often go,
Not by planning to, but by a flow
Away from all existence, to a cold
Lucidity, whose will is uncontrolled.
Here, the mills of God are never slow.
Poems
© Anselm Hollo
i
thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
ii
The Three Graves. A Fragment Of A Sexton's Tale
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The grapes upon the Vicar's wall
Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in sun and wind
Were falling from the tree.
Lux In Tenebris
© George Essex Evans
So set they discord in the sweetest singing,
And a sharp thorn about the fairest rose;
And doubt around the cross where faith was clinging,
And fear to haunt the regions of repose;
And dimmed mens eyes, so that they should not see,
Like Gods, the vistas of futurity.
