Travel poems
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Italy : 10. Como
© Samuel Rogers
I love to sail along the Larian Lake
Under the shore -- though not to visit Pliny,
To catch him musing in his plane-tree walk,
Or fishing, as he might be, from his window:
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Genie
© Arthur Rimbaud
He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.
He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life
And we remember him and he travels. . . And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”
He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
Braid Claith
© Robert Fergusson
Ye wha are fain to hae your name
Wrote in the bonny book of fame,
Let merit nae pretension claim
To laurel'd wreath,
But hap ye weel, baith back and wame,
In gude Braid Claith.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
© Walt Whitman
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
The Peacemaker
© Harriet Monroe
To the world-wanderer Samarkand is near,
The broad Pacific but a narrow strait.
Market-Night
© Robert Bloomfield
'O Winds, howl not so long and loud;
Nor with your vengeance arm the snow:
Bear hence each heavy-loaded cloud;
And let the twinkling Star-beams glow.
To the One Who is Reading Me
© Jorge Luis Borges
You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
Haymaking
© Edward Thomas
Aftear night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
Sermons We See
© Edgar Albert Guest
I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day;
I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
The eye's a better pupil and more willing than the ear,
Fine counsel is confusing, but example's always clear;
And the best of all the preachers are the men who live their creeds,
For to see good put in action is what everybody needs.
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.
brothers
© Paul Celan
(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)
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invitation
Life Cycle of Common Man
© Howard Nemerov
Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the middle class,
The Grey Tide
© John Le Gay Brereton
The cold green rocks and lapping waves
Are all my world as here I sit
With downcast eye and heart that craves
The bush and blue sky over it.
