War poems
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Peter Quince at the Clavier
© Edwin Muir
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Walter Llywarch
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch,
Born in Wales of approved parents,
Well goitred, round in the bum,
Sure prey of the slow virus
Bred in quarries of grey rain.
Daddy
© Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Yarrow Visited. September, 1814
© André Breton
And is this—Yarrow?—This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished,
The Tongues We Speak
© Patricia Goedicke
I have arrived here after taking many steps
Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives.
from The Seasons: Spring
© James Thomson
As rising from the vegetable World
My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend,
Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni
© Dante Alighieri
To the dim light and the large circle of shade
I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills,
There where we see no color in the grass.
Natheless my longing loses not its green,
It has so taken root in the hard stone
Which talks and hears as though it were a lady.
The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue
© Geoffrey Chaucer
But for to tellen yow of his array,
His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay;
Of fustian he wered a gypon
Al bismótered with his habergeon;
For he was late y-come from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage.
Eve of St. Agony or The Middleclass Was Sitting on Its Fat
© Kenneth Patchen
Ghosts in packs like dogs grinning at ghosts
Pocketless thieves in a city that never sleeps
Chains clank, warders curse, this world is stark mad
from The Lady of the Lake: The Western Waves of Ebbing Day
© Sir Walter Scott
The western waves of ebbing day
Rolled o’er the glen their level way;
Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet
© Lord Byron
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,
Our embargo's off at last;
Jewel Box
© Eamon Grennan
Your jewel box of white balsa strips
and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes
reading
© Joanne Burns
there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while. they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance. gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.
if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey. every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
For a' That and a' That
© Robert Burns
Is there, for honest poverty,
That hings his head, an' a' that?
The Past
© Henry Timrod
To-days most trivial act may hold the seed
Of future fruitfulness, or future dearth;
Oh, cherish always every word and deed!
The simplest record of thyself hath worth.
In Time
© William Stanley Merwin
The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
