War poems
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Has Your Soul Sipped?
© Wilfred Owen
Has your soul sipped
Of the sweetness of all sweets?
Has it well supped
But yet hungers and sweats?
On The Downs
© Edith Nesbit
THE little moon is dead,
Drowned in the flood of rain
That drips from roof of byre and shed,
And splashes in the lane:
The leafless lean-flanked lane where last year's leaves are spread.
Life Is A Dream - Act III
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
FIRST SOLDIER [within]. He is here within this tower.
Dash the door from off its hinges;
Enter all
Forms Of Prayer To Be Used At Sea
© John Keble
The shower of moonlight falls as still and clear
Upon this desert main
Ballad of Reading Gaol - I
© Oscar Wilde
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
An Elective Course
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
LINES FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF A HARVARD UNDERGRADUATE
The bloom that lies on Fanny's cheek
Masnawi
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
In the prologue to the Masnavi Rumi hailed Love and its sweet madness that heals all infirmities, and he exhorted the reader to burst the bonds to silver and gold to be free. The Beloved is all in all and is only veiled by the lover. Rumi identified the first cause of all things as God and considered all second causes subordinate to that. Human minds recognize the second causes, but only prophets perceive the action of the first cause. One story tells of a clever rabbit who warned the lion about another lion and showed the lion his own image in a well, causing him to attack it and drown. After delivering his companions from the tyrannical lion, the rabbit urges them to engage in the more difficult warfare against their own inward lusts. In a debate between trusting God and human exertion, Rumi quoted the prophet Muhammad as saying, "Trust in God, yet tie the camel's leg."8 He also mentioned the adage that the worker is the friend of God; so in trusting in providence one need not neglect to use means. Exerting oneself can be giving thanks for God's blessings; but he asked if fatalism shows gratitude.
God is hidden and has no opposite, not seen by us yet seeing us. Form is born of the formless but ultimately returns to the formless. An arrow shot by God cannot remain in the air but must return to God. Rumi reconciled God's agency with human free will and found the divine voice in the inward voice. Those in close communion with God are free, but the one who does not love is fettered by compulsion. God is the agency and first cause of our actions, but human will as the second cause finds recompense in hell or with the Friend. God is like the soul, and the world is like the body. The good and evil of bodies comes from souls. When the sanctuary of true prayer is revealed to one, it is shameful to turn back to mere formal religion. Rumi confirmed Muhammad's view that women hold dominion over the wise and men of heart; but violent fools, lacking tenderness, gentleness, and friendship, try to hold the upper hand over women, because they are swayed by their animal nature. The human qualities of love and tenderness can control the animal passions. Rumi concluded that woman is a ray of God and the Creator's self.
The Son
© Jones Very
Father, I wait thy word. The sun doth stand
Beneath the mingling line of night and day,
Childhood
© William Barnes
Aye, at that time our days wer but vew,
An' our lim's wer but small, an' a-growèn;
Heine In Paris
© Kenneth Slessor
LATE: a cold smear of sunlight bathes the room;
The gilt lime of winter, a sun grown melancholy old,
Streams in the glass. Outside, ten thousand chimneys fume,
Looping the weather-birds with rings of gold;
Glee
© George Borrow
Roseate colours on heavens high arch
Are beginning to mix with the blue and the gray,
The Burial in the Snow
© Julia A Moore
The people of that party
Lay scattered all around,
Some were frightened, others laughed,
To think it happened so,
That the end of their sleigh ride
Was a burial in the snow.
The Lake of the Dismal Swamp
© Thomas Moore
"THEY made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
Widow
© Sylvia Plath
Widow. The word consumes itself --
Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire
Levitating a numb minute in the updraft
Over the scalding, red topography
That will put her heart out like an only eye.
The Old Mans Dream After He Died
© Robinson Jeffers
from CAWDOR
Gently with delicate mindless fingers
Cromwell
© Albert Durrant Watson
This too remember well
I learned it late: None but a tyrant makes
That good prevail that is not in men's hearts,
And tyranny is questionable good.
Therefore must all men learn by liberty,
And with what pain their doings on them bring.
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire
© George Gordon Byron
These are the themes that claim our plaudits now;
These are the bards to whom the muse must bow;
While Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot,
Resign their hallow'd bays to Walter Scott.
The Rail Road
© Jones Very
Thou great proclaimer to the outward eye
Of what the spirit too would seek to tell,
