Truth poems
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A Death in the Desert
© Robert Browning
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept:
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.
A Shropshire Lad XXX: Others, I am not the first
© Alfred Edward Housman
Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, 'tis nothing new.
The College Colonel
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
He rides at their head;
A crutch by his saddle just slants in view,
Nel Mezzo Del Cammin
© Sir Henry Newbolt
Whisper it not that late in years
Sorrow shall fade and the world be brighter,
Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV
© Alexander Pope
Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul,
Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start ev'n from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at—perhaps a Stowe.
A Happy Childhood
© William Matthews
No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo
My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air
Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell
© Patrick Kavanagh
Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though loath to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honied thought
For the priest's cant,
Or statesman's rant.
All the Members of My Tribe Are Liars
© John Fuller
Think of a self-effacing missionary
Tending the vices of a problem tribe.
He knows the quickest cure for beri-beri
And how to take a bribe.
The Lovers' Walk
© Roderic Quinn
BY the slowly flowing river
Lies the old, shadowed walk,
Where the lovers, two and two,
Ere the falling of the dew,
Sonnet XXV
© George Santayana
As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
A Legend of Truth
© Rudyard Kipling
Then came a War when, bombed and gassed and mined,
Truth rose once more, perforce, to meet mankind,
And through the dust and glare and wreck of things,
Beheld a phantom on unbalanced wings,
Reeling and groping, dazed, dishevelled, dumb,
But semaphoring direr deeds to come.
Narcissus
© Delmore Schwartz
“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.
The Unknown Eros. Book I.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to hold
In vestal February;
Not rather choosing out some rosy day
From the rich coronet of the coming May,
When all things meet to marry!
The Door
© Robert Creeley
for Robert Duncan
It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.
Foundations
© William Wilfred Campbell
So life and all its idols hath its hour,
Its fleet, ephemeral dream, its passing show,
Its pomp of fevered hopes that come and go:
Then stripped of vanity and folly's power,
Like some wide water bared to moon and star,
We know ourselves in truth for what we are.
The Ladder of St. Augustine
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea - Book The Fifth
© William Lisle Bowles
Such are thy views, DISCOVERY! The great world
Rolls to thine eye revealed; to thee the Deep
