Travel poems
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Kate of Kenmare
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Oh! many bright eyes full of goodness and gladness,
Where the pure soul looks out, and the heart loves to shine,
Unshriven
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Oh! the sun rose on the lea, and the bird sang merrilie,
And the steed stood ready harness'd in the hall,
And he left his lady's bower, and he sought the eastern tower,
And he lifted cloak and weapon from the wall.
La Solitude de St. Amant
© Katherine Philips
1O! Solitude, my sweetest choice
Places devoted to the night,
Remote from tumult, and from noise,
How you my restless thoughts delight!
Godly Ballants
© George MacDonald
The rich man sat in his father's seat-
Purple an' linen, an' a'thing fine!
The puir man lay at his yett i' the street-
Sairs an' tatters, an' weary pine!
Morning
© Jones Very
The light will never open sightless eyes,
It comes to those who willingly would see;
Conversation Galante
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
I OBSERVE: Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester Johns balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress.
She then: How you digress!
Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
(The Dry Salvagespresumably les trois sauvagesis a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
He gives one flash of his glass-green eyes
And the signal goes "All Clear!"
And we're off at last for the northern part
Of the Northern Hemisphere!
Journey Of The Magi
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
Palm
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
M'Fingal - Canto IV
© John Trumbull
"For me, before that fatal time,
I mean to fly th' accursed clime,
And follow omens, which of late
Have warn'd me of impending fate.
In Every Direction
© Ralph Angel
As if you actually died in that dream
and woke up dead. Shadows of untangling vines
tumble toward the ceiling. A delicate
lizard sits on your shoulder, its eyes
blinking in every direction.
kumrads die because they're told)
© Edward Estlin Cummings
kumrads die because they're told)
kumrads die before they're old
(kumrads aren't afraid to die
kumrads don't
and kumrads won't
believe in life)and death knows whie
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
© Edward Estlin Cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
The Arrivals
© Sharon Olds
I pull the bed slowly open, I
open the lips of the bed, get
the stack of fresh underpants
out of the suitcasepeach, white,
Thesaurus
© Billy Collins
It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.
Dear Reader
© Billy Collins
Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.
Candle Hat
© Billy Collins
In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.
The Art Of Drowning
© Billy Collins
I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
The Sompnour's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. Carrack: A great ship of burden used by the Portuguese; the
name is from the Italian, "cargare," to load
