All Poems
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Song to Amarantha, that she would Dishevel her Hair
© Richard Lovelace
Amarantha sweet and fair
Ah braid no more that shining hair!
As my curious hand or eye
Hovering round thee let it fly.
Consistency
© Eugene Field
Should painter attach to a fair human head
The thick, turgid neck of a stallion,
Or depict a spruce lass with the tail of a bass,
I am sure you would guy the rapscallion.
Seele im Raum
© Randall Jarrell
It is over.
It is over so long that I begin to think
That it did not exist, that I have never—
And my son says, one morning, from the paper:
“An eland. Look, an eland!”
—It was so.
Superliminare
© George Herbert
Thou, whom the former precepts have
Sprinkled and taught, how to behave
Thy self in church; approach, and taste
Thy churches mysticall repast.
A Ballad of François Villon, Prince of All Ballad-Makers
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
The Tickle
© Gamaliel Bradford
I like to read confessions
As lengthy as Rousseau's,
With all their slow processions
Of innumerable woes.
Space Bar
© Heather McHugh
Lined up behind the space bartender
is the meaning of it all, the vessels
marked with letters, numbers,
signs. Beyond the flats
Address For The Opening Of The Fifth Avenue Theatre
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HANG out our banners on the stately tower
It dawns at last--the long-expected hour!
The steep is climbed, the star-lit summit won,
The builder's task, the artist's labor done;
Before the finished work the herald stands,
And asks the verdict of your lips and hands!
The Warrior's Prayer
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Long since, in sore distress, I heard one pray,
"Lord, who prevailest with resistless might,
Ever from war and strife keep me away,
My battles fight!"
Messiah (Christmas Portions)
© Mark Doty
A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:
Storm Ending
© Jean Toomer
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
"The Old Psalm Tune"
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
You asked, dear friend, the other day,
Why still my charmed ear
Rejoiceth in uncultured tone
That old psalm tune to hear?
On Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell
© Geoffrey Hill
Whether or not shadows are of the substance
such is the expectation I can
On the Poet’s Birth
© Robert Graves
A page, a huntsman and a priest of God
Her lovers, met in jealous contrariety
Equally claiming the sole parenthood
Of him the perfect crown of their variety.
Then, whom to admit, herself she could not tell:
That always was her fate, she loved too well.
