War poems
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from The Prelude: Book 2: School-time (Continued)
© André Breton
Fare Thee well!
Health, and the quiet of a healthful mind
Attend thee! seeking oft the haunts of men,
And yet more often living with Thyself,
And for Thyself, so haply shall thy days
Be many, and a blessing to mankind.
from The Faerie Queene: Book I, Canto I
© Edmund Spenser
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Lycidas
© Patrick Kavanagh
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
Tristram And Iseult
© Matthew Arnold
Tristram. Is she not come? The messenger was sure
Prop me upon the pillows once again
Raise me, my page! this cannot long endure.
Christ, what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!
What lights will those out to the northward be?
The Idols
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I.2
The Forests of the Night awaken blind in heat
Of black stupor; and stirring in its deep retreat,
I hear the heart of Darkness slowly beat and beat.
The Eolian Harp
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Stanzas
© Aldous Huxley
Thought is an unseen net wherein our mind
Is taken and vainly struggles to be free:
Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain
© Louis Simpson
. . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any
previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . .
Ortega y Gasset
Lohengrin
© Emma Lazarus
THE holy bell, untouched by human hands,
Clanged suddenly, and tolled with solemn knell.
Between the massive, blazoned temple-doors,
Thrown wide, to let the summer morning in,
The Seventh Inning
© Donald Hall
1. Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole
occupation of the aging boy.
A Visit to Qiantang Lake in Spring
© Bai Juyi
Gushan Temple is to the north, Jiating pavilion west,
The water's surface now is calm, the bottom of the clouds low.
Clouds
© Denise Levertov
The clouds as I see them, rising
urgently, roseate in the
mounting of somber power
Rain After A Vaudeville Show
© Stephen Vincent Benet
The last pose flickered, failed. The screen's dead white
Glared in a sudden flooding of harsh light
The Verse of Coleridges Christobel
© Charles Harpur
MARK yon runnel how tis flowing,
Like a sylvan spirit dreaming
Life
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Acrust of bread and a corner to sleep in,
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,
A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,
And never a laugh but the moans come double;
And that is life!
The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young
© William Blake
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
The Imperfect Enjoyment
© John Wilmot
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Eros
© John Hall Wheelock
Surely thy body is thy mind,
For in thy face is nought to find,
Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile,
But shameless will and power immense,
In secret sensuous innocence.
The Ballad of the Anti-Puritan
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Envoi
Prince, Bayard would have smashed his sword
To see the sort of knights you dub-
Is that the last of them-O Lord
Will someone take me to a pub?
The Doubt of Future Foes
© Queen Elizabeth I
The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy;
