All Poems
/ page 2268 of 3210 /
The Drunken Fisherman
© Robert Lowell
Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
The Shadow
© Arthur Symons
When I am walking sadly or triumphantly.
With eyes that brood upon the smouldering thought of you,
Waking in the Blue
© Robert Lowell
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention
© Yehuda Amichai
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
© Robert Lowell
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
--Schopenhauer
The Withdrawal
© Robert Lowell
This week the house went on the market
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a room, it moves
with embarrassment, and joins another room.
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
© Robert Lowell
(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
The Winter Harvest
© Lloyd Roberts
Between the blackened curbs lie stacked the harvest of the skies,
Long lines of frozen, grimy cocks befouled by city feet;
On either side the racing throngs, the crowding cliffs, the cries,
And ceaseless winds that eddy down to whip the iron street.
History
© Robert Lowell
History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Wodwo
© Ted Hughes
What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
Dolphin
© Robert Lowell
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Ph?dre.
Telling You All
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Telling you all would take too long.
Besides, we read in the Bible
how the good is harmful
and how misfortune is good.
Homecoming
© Robert Lowell
What was is . . . since 1930;
the boys in my old gang
are senior partners. They start up
bald like baby birds
to embrace retirement.
The Rain
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
This is the rhyme of the rain on the roof,
Tears, all tears, slow falling tears
The Leader and the Bad Girl
© Henry Lawson
BECAUSE HE had sinned and suffered, because he loved the land,
And because of his wonderful sympathy, he held mens hearts in his hand.
Born and bred of the people, he knew their every whim,
And because he had struggled through poverty he could draw the poor to him:
Speaker and leader and poet, tall and handsome and strong,
With the eyes of a dog for faith and truth that blazed at the thought of a wrong.
Man And Wife
© Robert Lowell
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade--
loving, rapid, merciless--
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
Skunk Hour
© Robert Lowell
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The Universal Shyp
© Sebastian Brant
Come to, Companyons: ren: tyme it is to rowe:
Our Carake fletis: the se is large and wyde
For the Union Dead
© Robert Lowell
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
