Time poems
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Hellas
© Oscar Wilde
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
The Last Leaf
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o'er the ground
With his cane.
Fitz-Greene Halleck
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Among their graven shapes to whom
Thy civic wreaths belong,
O city of his love, make room
For one whose gift was song.
The Boys
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HAS there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise.
Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
Old Time is a liar! We're twenty to-night!
A Parody on A Psalm of Life
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is real, life is earnest,
And the shell is not its pen
Egg thou art, and egg remainest
Was not spoken of the hen.
Summer Images
© John Clare
Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned,
Precedence takes of rosy fingered Spring;
Bluenote Time
© Adrian Green
in the soft jazz and midnight hour
your eyes are dancing close to mine
a sway of hips, a touch of lips
The Expatriates
© Anne Sexton
My dear, it was a moment
to clutch for a moment
so that you may believe in it
and believing is the act of love, I think,
even in the telling, wherever it went.
The Missionary - Canto Eighth
© William Lisle Bowles
Oh, shout for Lautaro, the young and the brave!
The arm of whose strength was uplifted to save,
When the steeds of the strangers came rushing amain,
And the ghosts of our fathers looked down on the slain!
The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts
© Anne Sexton
She's the one I carried my bones to
and built a house that was just a cot
and built a life that was over an hour
and built a castle where no one lives
and built, in the end, a song
to go with the ceremony.
Some Foreign Letters
© Anne Sexton
I knew you forever and you were always old,
soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold
me for sitting up late, reading your letters,
as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me.
The Fury Of Flowers And Worms
© Anne Sexton
Let the flowers make a journey
on Monday so that I can see
ten daisies in a blue vase
with perhaps one red ant
The Legend Of The One-Eyed Man
© Anne Sexton
Like Oedipus I am losing my sight.
LIke Judas I have done my wrong.
Their punishment is over;
the shame and disgrace of it
An Ode Of Congratulation
© Confucius
The russet pear-tree stands there all alone;
How bright the growth of fruit upon it shown!
The Lost Ingredient
© Anne Sexton
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal
toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost
ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust
would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
The Division Of Parts
© Anne Sexton
1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
A Destiny
© Caroline Norton
And his two sons in careless beauty grew,
Like wild-flowers in his path: he mark'd them not,
Nor reck'd he what they needed, learnt, or knew,
Or what might be on earth their future lot;
But they died young--which is a thought of rest!
Unscorn'd, untempted, undefiled--so best.
Four Years
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
At the Midsummer, when the hay was down,
Said I mournful - Though my life be in its prime,
Bare lie my meadows all shorn before their time,
O'er my sere woodlands the leaves are turning brown;
