War poems
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The Shivering Beggar
© Robert Graves
NEAR Clapham village, where fields began,
Saint Edward met a beggar man.
It was Christmas morning, the church bells tolled,
The old man trembled for the fierce cold.
Babylon
© Robert Graves
The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And alls poetry with him.
1915
© Robert Graves
Ive watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bass?e and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
To Robert Nichols
© Robert Graves
(From Frise on the Somme in February, 1917, in answer to a letter saying: I am just finishing my Fauns Holiday. I wish you were here to feed him with cherries.)
Here by a snowbound river
In scrapen holes we shiver,
And like old bitterns we
The Thieves
© Robert Graves
Lovers in the act despense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
'I and you are both away.'
The Next War
© Robert Graves
You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Fathers hay
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,
Dead Cow Farm
© Robert Graves
An ancient saga tells us how
In the beginning the First Cow
(For nothing living yet had birth
But Elemental Cow on earth)
Antara
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Though thou thy fair face concealest still in thy veil from me,
yet am I he that hath captured horse--riders how many!
Give me the praise of my fair deeds. Lady, thou knowest it,
kindly am I and forbearing, save when wrong presseth me.
Only when evil assaileth, deal I with bitterness;
then am I cruel in vengeance, bitter as colocynth.
A Monarch's Death-Bed
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
A monarch on his death-bed lay -
Did censors waft perfume,
A Fallen Yew
© Francis Thompson
It seemed corrival of the world's great prime,
Made to un-edge the scythe of Time,
And last with stateliest rhyme.
The Beach
© Robert Graves
Louder than gulls the little children scream
Whom fathers haul into the jovial foam;
But others fearlessly rush in, breast high,
Laughing the salty water from their mouthes--
Heroes of the nursery.
Warning to Children
© Robert Graves
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
Antonio Melidori
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
SCENE I.
[A place not far from the summit of Mount Psiloriti, in the Isle of Candia. Philota discovered with a basket of grapes upon her head; she looks eagerly upward. Time, a little before sunset.]
PHILOTA.
Call It a Good Marriage
© Robert Graves
Call it a good marriage -
For no one ever questioned
Her warmth, his masculinity,
Their interlocking views;
Like Snow
© Robert Graves
She, then, like snow in a dark night,
Fell secretly. And the world waked
With dazzling of the drowsy eye,
So that some muttered 'Too much light',
Phantasy
© George Meredith
Within a Temple of the Toes,
Where twirled the passionate Wili,
I saw full many a market rose,
And sighed for my village lily.
The White Doe Of Rylstone, Or, The Fate Of The Nortons - Canto Sixth
© William Wordsworth
WHY comes not Francis?--From the doleful City
He fled,--and, in his flight, could hear
The death-sounds of the Minster-bell:
That sullen stroke pronounced farewell
