War poems
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Nights on Planet Earth
© Louis Zukofsky
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the skyand a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very airis a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).
Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
1
Australia To England
© John Farrell
What of the years of Englishmen?
What have they brought of growth and grace
An Essay on Criticism: Part 1
© Alexander Pope
But you who seek to give and merit fame,
And justly bear a critic's noble name,
Be sure your self and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.
The Call of the Congo
© Jessie Pope
I go as a rule
At the coming of Yule,
To a place where the sunshine's obtrusive ;
At Hydros I'm found,
Where dyspeptics abound,
And massage and physic's inclusive ;
Burns
© Fitz-Greene Halleck
WILD ROSE of Alloway! my thanks:
Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon
When first we met upon "the banks
And braes o'bonny Doon."
Nymphidia, The Court Of Fairy
© Michael Drayton
Old Chaucer doth of Thopas tell,
Mad Rabelais of Pantagruel,
Unnumbered Ward
© James Schuyler
And accustomed ungentle hands of two blue-uniformed attendants
wrap the patient in suffering’s white bed gown
Homer's Battle Of The Frogs And Mice. Book I
© Thomas Parnell
So pass'd Europa thro' the rapid Sea,
Trembling and fainting all the vent'rous Way;
With oary Feet the Bull triumphant rode,
And safe in Crete depos'd his lovely Load.
Ah safe at last! may thus the Frog support
My trembling Limbs to reach his ample Court.
Lines In Memory Of Edmund Morris
© Duncan Campbell Scott
How shall we transmit in tendril-like images,
The tenuous tremor in the tissues of ether,
Before the round of colour buds like the dome of a shrine,
The preconscious moment when love has fluttered in the bosom,
Before it begins to ache?
Winter Roses
© John Greenleaf Whittier
My garden roses long ago
Have perished from the leaf-strewn walks;
Their pale, fair sisters smile no more
Upon the sweet-brier stalks.
After Catullus and Horace
© Bernadette Mayer
only the manners of centuries ago can teach me
how to address you my lover as who you are
Paradise Regain'd: Book III (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
SO spake the Son of God, and Satan stood
A while as mute confounded what to say,
The Recluse - Book First
© William Wordsworth
HOME AT GRASMERE
ONCE to the verge of yon steep barrier came
A roving school-boy; what the adventurer's age
Hath now escaped his memory--but the hour,
Brothers-American Drama
© James Weldon Johnson
See! There he stands; not brave, but with an air
Of sullen stupor. Mark him well! Is he
Not more like brute than man? Look in his eye!
No light is there; none, save the glint that shines
In the now glaring, and now shifting orbs
Of some wild animal caught in the hunter’s trap.
Paradise Lost: Book IX (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
To whom the Virgin Majestie of Eve,
As one who loves, and some unkindness meets,
With sweet austeer composure thus reply'd,
