War poems
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Senlin: His Dark Origins
© Conrad Aiken
He lights his pipe with a pointed flame.
'Yet, there were many autumns before I came,
And many springs. And more will come, long after
There is no horn for me, or song, or laughter.
Improvisations: Light And Snow
© Conrad Aiken
How many times have I sat here,
How many times will I sit here again,
Thinking these same things over and over in solitude
As a child says over and over
The first word he has learned to say.
Pink Dominoes
© Rudyard Kipling
"They are fools who kiss and tell" -
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.
Discordants
© Conrad Aiken
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Chiarascuro: Rose
© Conrad Aiken
Fill your bowl with roses: the bowl, too, have of crystal.
Sit at the western window. Take the sun
Between your hands like a ball of flaming crystal,
Poise it to let it fall, but hold it still,
And meditate on the beauty of your existence;
The beauty of this, that you exist at all.
A Letter From Li Po
© Conrad Aiken
Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
announces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
The Waradgery Tribe
© Dame Mary Gilmore
Harried we were, and spent,
broken and falling,
ere as the cranes we went,
crying and calling.
Fragment: Modern Love
© John Keats
And what is love? It is a doll dress'd up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
The Hunter's Serenade
© William Cullen Bryant
Thy bower is finished, fairest!
Fit bower for hunter's bride--
The donts and zeros
© Dimitris P. Kraniotis
The night
that strangled
the endless moments
I had wished
The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature
© Joseph Warton
Ye green-rob'd Dryads, oft' at dusky Eve
By wondering Shepherds seen, to Forests brown,
The Pleasures of Melancholy
© Thomas Warton
Mother of musings, Contemplation sage,
Whose grotto stands upon the topmost rock
Of Teneriffe; 'mid the tempestuous night,
On which, in calmest meditation held,
The Sword Of The Tomb : A Northern Legend
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Voice of the gifted elder time!
Voice of the charm and the Runic rhyme!
Speak! from the shades and the depths disclose,
How Sigurd may vanquish his mortal foes;
Voice of the buried past!
The Pumpkin
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,
The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,
And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,
With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,
The Norsemen ( From Narrative and Legendary Poems )
© John Greenleaf Whittier
GIFT from the cold and silent Past!
A relic to the present cast,
Left on the ever-changing strand
Of shifting and unstable sand,
The Changeling ( From The Tent on the Beach )
© John Greenleaf Whittier
FOR the fairest maid in Hampton
They needed not to search,
Who saw young Anna favor
Come walking into church,--
Telling the Bees
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Here is the place; right over the hill
Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
Stanzas for the Times
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Is this the land our fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?
Is this the soil whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in?
Are we the sons by whom are borne
The mantles which the dead have worn?
To Mr. Rowland Woodward
© John Donne
LIKE one who in her third widowhood doth profess
Herself a nun, tied to retiredness,
So affects my Muse, now, a chaste fallowness.
